In its lawsuit against OpenAI, Apple filed what it calls “shocking evidence” to bolster its allegations that former employees stole trade secrets for OpenAI’s benefit. These new details emerged after the legal counsel for former Apple employee Chang Liu — who now works at OpenAI — handed over Liu’s old Apple work laptop for investigation earlier this month.

Apple now alleges that Liu used a confidential Apple circuit schematic in his work at OpenAI, as well as a tool that shares a name with an internal Apple engineering application. The company claims that OpenAI was “well-aware” of Liu’s access to Apple data, and that Liu enlisted OpenAI colleague Yu-Ting Peng to help destroy evidence in June when he learned that Apple was investigating him.

“The MacBook represents the very limited information Defendants provided so far (and only after weeks of delay), and shows Apple is not conducting ‘fishing expeditions’ but that its trade secrets are being used and evidence is being destroyed,” the filing reads.

In a related development, while this new evidence is redacted from public view, past filings from Apple have included text messages from Liu — which he punctuated with “crying laughing” emojis — showing he was aware that he still had access to Apple files.

OpenAI has previously defended Liu by saying that he only accessed Apple files after he stopped working there in order to help former colleagues who asked for his assistance. “Apple now tries to shift the blame to ‘residual access,’ but they also don’t disclose that this is a common issue with Apple which is caused by them failing to properly manage system access when people leave,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post earlier this month.

But Apple claims that Liu had continued access because he “exploited a rare, previously unknown authentication bug.”

Furthermore, techCrunch has requested comment from OpenAI on Apple’s newest allegations.

Apple is seeking a preliminary injunction — a court order that would block OpenAI from working on hardware based on Apple’s technology while the case is ongoing — as well as expedited discovery, a fast-tracked process for gathering evidence, since the company alleges that more former employees may also be implicated.

As per to Apple’s initial filing, more than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI.

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Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of technology and culture. She has also written for publications like Polygon, MTV, the Kenyon Review, NPR, and Business Insider. She is the co-host of Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture, with science fiction author Isabel J. Kim. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she worked as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and film festival coordinator. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Princeton in Asia Fellow in Laos.

You can contact or verify outreach from Amanda by emailing amanda@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at @amanda.100 on Signal.

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