The stolen files, NAMED: >DisplayNotes.key — "several hundred pages" on Apple's custom display power development program >Architecture analyses. Fabrication decisions. Testing results >Engineering data for an UNANNOUNCED Apple product: 'touch, display, and power systems" >Final.key + V2.key — compilations of two undisclosed Apple R&D projects >and those are "only four of the dozens of proprietary documents Mr. Liu stole"
Also
>OpenAI "directed a trusted Apple partner [name redacted] to perform [Apple's proprietary metal finishing] process for them, knowing it was proprietary to Apple... because they were involved in this partnership while at Apple."
So apparently yes, OpenAI is very interested in Apple's hardware. I don't see any references to software secrets in the filing, it seems to be entirely about hardware.
I do not know whether this lines up with the claims of stolen files.
The second part reads to me like they asked some company to perform a special metal finishing, knowing that they perform similar work for Apple.
I am no lawyer and I do not understand what is proprietary to Apple here, it just does not sound that big a deal to me.
Now that is a charitable reading. Maybe OpenAI ruthlessly stole Apple's trade secrets. I do not know.
The special technique is the IP. In hardware manufacturing, the process is the IP and can be considered a trade secret, so even if that supplier does metal finishing for a ton of different clients, Apple's specific "recipe" or whatever is a legally protected trade secret, they would not be allowed to do it for anyone else.
Apple is alleging a little more than going and asking the supplier to do it though, in the lawsuit they are alleging the former employee leveraged their own relationship with the supplier to present the request as if Apple had approved it (to use their wording "Misleading the partner to believe they had Apple's permission to do so").