Sam AltmanApple’s love for Apple is being tested by that pesky detail: the Cupertino tech giant’s lawsuit against OpenAI.
‘I’m like a mega Apple fanboy, and I was very sad about that,” Altman recently told tech journalist Alex Heath.
In July, Apple has sued OpenAIaccusing the creator of ChatGPT of a “coordinated pattern of misconduct at the institutional level” to steal Apple’s closely guarded secrets. OpenAI has said it has “no interest in the trade secrets of other companies” and that the lawsuit does not live up to Apple’s “reputation of obsession with the smallest details.”
Altman said that when he first heard about the lawsuit, he thought something had gone significantly wrong.
“When I first heard about it, I thought, ‘Man, this sounds egregious. Someone must have done something bad,'” Altman said. “We don’t want any company’s IP address, and we certainly don’t want people bringing any company’s IP address to us.”
Altman is barely mentioned in Apple’s initial 40-page complaint, which, among several corporate entities, directly named only two OpenAI employees: Chang Liu and Tang Tanboth of whom previously worked for Apple, as defendants. Apple’s complaint said Liu and Tan took or withheld confidential information when they left the company and in some cases asked current Apple employees about unannounced products.
The lawsuit marks a dramatic turn from what had once been an important partnership.
In June 2024, Altman went to Cupertino to announce that Apple would integrate ChatGPT into its products.
Their partnership is frayed Now that OpenAI has entered the consumer space, Apple has dominated for a long time. Less than a year after his speech at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, Altman and iPhone designer Jony Ive announced that they have been working together for years and that OpenAI would acquire Ive’s startup IO for almost $6.5 billion.
As part of the legal battle, Apple requested a preliminary injunction, which could potentially delay OpenAI’s plans. In response, OpenAI said that Apple is trying to delay OpenAI’s hardware “because it fears OpenAI’s product could reduce demand for Apple’s.”
The apple of his eye
Altman will be appearing at the 2024 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference Nic Coury/AFP via Getty Images
Altman’s love for Apple is well documented.
In 2008, he demonstrated Loopt, the location-based social networking app he co-founded, at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. Altman said it’s necessary to be on stage Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ approval. Looking back on the experience, he called it “a career highlight” and said it was “the only time in business” he felt so much fear.
“It was like Steve Jobs, you know,” Altman said in 2015, recalling growing up seeing Jobs as an iconic figure.
Altman said that when he was growing up, his first computer was a Macintosh LC II. In 2024, he said Bill Gates that he still owns it and it still works. When Altman announced his collaboration with Ive, he mentioned his hope to “bring some of the joy, wonder and creative spirit that I first felt using an Apple computer thirty years ago.”
In conversation with Ive and Laurene Powell Jobs Last year, Altman declared the iPhone “the crowning achievement of consumer products” during an onstage interview last November.
Altman, who has no stake in OpenAI, has built his fortune largely through investments in companies like Stripe and Reddit. His grandmother gave him what may have been one of his first investments in technology.
In a 2016 interview with his brother Jack, the couple recalled how, for their birthdays, their grandmother gave them equal shares in companies they thought they would like. Jack got Applebee’s, while Sam got Apple.
“I still have those Apple shares marked in my investment account as ‘Grandma’s Birthday Apple Stocks,’ Sam Altman said, and added, “I’m going to keep them.”
