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Apple disputes what an empty timestamp on a departed engineer's Mac mini proves
In a joint filing made public last week, Apple asked to put its own forensic experts on the images the defendants' experts already read, and for OpenAI's records on metal finishes, power management and battery work.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Apple has asked the court in its trade secrets case to let its own forensic experts review the underlying images that the defendants' experts used to analyze former employee Chang Liu's devices.
- Apple says an earlier inspection of a MacBook Liu used after leaving showed he ran a simulation with a confidential Apple circuit schematic at OpenAI, and pointed to a Mac mini Apple then sought.
- Apple is also seeking expedited documents on OpenAI's hardware development work covering metal finishes, power management and battery functionality.
- OpenAI's answer to the suit is that the case is "a mess of Apple's own making," since lax offboarding and security let departing staff unintentionally retain access to confidential information.
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Why it matters
- exposure If the court grants the hardware request, development records for an unreleased device land with the company suing over them, under whatever protective terms the parties negotiate.
- constraint OpenAI's independent-development defense is what makes its development records arguable material. Raising it on the merits is also what exposes those records.
- decision For whoever owns offboarding, the defense OpenAI raised turns the exit checklist into an evidentiary record. A company later has to argue from the logs it kept at departure.
- precedent Should a court accept Apple's reading of empty last-used fields, internal reports that clear a departing employee on timestamp evidence alone stop being a defensible finding.
This filing turns on two artifacts, a file of zero bytes and a file whose last-used field is empty, and on whether a report showing either one means nothing happened.
Apple wrote in the joint filing that the defendants' experts read them exactly that way [1]: "Apple's forensic expert has already uncovered several critical flaws in the analysis conducted by Defendants' experts, including (1) failures to locate files on Mr. Liu's Mac Mini that were demonstrably used and stored on that device and (2) incorrect conclusions that the presence of files with zero bytes or an empty kMDItemLastUsedDate field on the Mac Mini means those files were not accessed." [11]
The disagreement is about what a missing timestamp proves. A clean forensic report is narrower evidence than proof that a file was never used: the tool that looked wrote no record of use in the field it checked.
OpenAI's counterproposal would keep Apple's experts off the images and hand them to a neutral examiner working under a protocol both sides agree to [12]. That leaves Apple at a disadvantage, the company argues, because the defendants' own experts have already had direct access to the same material [13].
The second request reaches work that has not shipped. OpenAI has said its metal finishes were developed independently, without Apple confidential information, and that the simulation Liu ran using an Apple confidential file had nothing to do with its upcoming product [14]. The defendants have now put their development at issue, Apple argues, and it wants the underlying development records to test those statements [16][15]. OpenAI calls that an attempt to "snoop on a competitor" [15].
Apple's reason for wanting a fast track is that OpenAI is still building the product, so any use of its trade secrets becomes further intertwined with that work and harder to undo as the months pass [8]. OpenAI's answer is that Apple has not shown why a separate expedited process is warranted and that the requests are too broad [9]. A related motion from Apple would restrict OpenAI's use of the claimed secrets while the case runs, with possible effect on its hardware development [7]. The 9to5Mac report on the filing does not describe a ruling on any of it [18].
Most companies will never fight over an unreleased device and will still have the evidence problem. For each sensitive file, the question is which log would record that someone opened it, and what that log means when it is empty. Where nothing was recording, the exit report describes the logging coverage. In this case Apple alleges that Chang Liu coached another Apple employee on materials to review ahead of an OpenAI interview, and that Tang Tan directed Apple job candidates to bring hardware components and other materials to interviews [4].
What to watch
- Whether the court grants Apple's experts direct access to the forensic images or adopts OpenAI's neutral-examiner protocol.
- Whether an expedited discovery order reaches OpenAI's metal finish, power management and battery records, and what protective terms cover them.
- A ruling on Apple's preliminary injunction, which would bear on OpenAI's in-progress hardware work.