Apple warns ex-staff may have leak

Apple’s latest court filing reveals the company believes the data transfer didn’t stop at the two former employees already named — the scope could be broader.

The filing, submitted late last week in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, doesn’t offer a headcount but says internal audits flagged “additional individuals” who may have accessed and exfiltrated sensitive datasets before joining OpenAI. The datasets in question span everything from unreleased hardware specifications to training data for Apple’s own large-language-model efforts.

> “Based on our investigation to date, we have identified additional former employees who may have had access to and transferred confidential information to OpenAI,” Apple wrote. “We continue to investigate and are taking steps to preserve evidence.”

The language is cautious — “may have” rather than “did” — but the subtext is clear: Apple’s legal team is widening its net.

From a hiring standpoint, this is a reminder that tech companies are treating employee mobility as a national-security-level concern. OpenAI, for its part, has stayed publicly silent on whether it received any materials. If the investigation uncovers concrete transfers, expect this to become a test case for how aggressively Apple will pursue former talent — and how OpenAI handles inadvertent ingestion of proprietary data in its training pipelines.