Sam Altman’s Apple fandom gets complicated as company sues OpenAI
Altman calls himself ‘mega Apple fanboy’ even as the company accuses OpenAI of stealing trade secrets
Sam Altman has spent decades describing himself as an unabashed Apple devotee, which makes the company's trade secrets lawsuit against his own OpenAI a particularly uncomfortable moment.
"I'm like a mega Apple fanboy, and I was very sad about that," Altman told journalist Alex Heath in a recent interview, describing his reaction to the case.
Apple filed suit in July, accusing OpenAI of a "coordinated pattern of misconduct at an institutional level" to obtain its trade secrets.
The 40-page complaint barely mentions Altman directly; it instead names two individual defendants, Chang Liu and Tang Tan, both former Apple employees now at OpenAI, alleging they took or retained confidential information and, in some cases, questioned current Apple staff about unannounced products.
OpenAI has denied wanting any company's intellectual property, calling the allegations beneath Apple's "reputation for obsessing over the smallest details".
The legal battle is a complete turnaround from how things were in June 2024 when Altman made a visit to Cupertino to announce the integration of ChatGPT in all Apple products.
Altman and OpenAI started to develop a bad relationship after Altman decided to venture into the realm of hardware and software, which have been the domain of Apple for long.
Almost a year after the Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) visit, it was made clear by Altman and former Apple designer Jony Ive that they had been working together for years, leading to OpenAI acquiring io, the company founded by Jony Ive, at around $6.5 billion.
Altman's connection with Apple dates back to all this by almost two decades. In 2008, he demonstrated his company Loopt live on stage at the Apple developer event, something which had to be approved by Steve Jobs personally and something which Altman described as the highlight of his career in terms of anxiety.
His first computer was the Macintosh LC II, which he told Bill Gates in 2024 that he still has and which still works. Last November, while sitting next to Ive and Laurene Powell-Jobs, he called the iPhone "the crowning achievement of consumer products".
