NEW YORK – An attorney’s mix-up of two OpenAI employees’ last names appears to have set off the chain of events that put Apple and OpenAI in federal court, and according to NBC News, it also undermines a central claim Apple made in its own lawsuit.
The error, confirmed by people familiar with the proceedings, occurred when Apple’s outside counsel confused the surnames of two OpenAI employees named Wang and Chang, sending at least one communication to the wrong person. That clerical mistake fed a breakdown in contact that Apple’s legal team later characterized as OpenAI failing to respond. Except OpenAI did respond.
NBC News, citing reporting by technology reporter David Ingram published Monday, confirmed that OpenAI replied to Apple’s initial February outreach, directly contradicting the lawsuit’s assertion that the company went silent when approached. The filing claimed Apple exhausted informal channels before seeking court intervention, but that picture has become considerably murkier.
Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI centers on allegations that former Apple employees who joined OpenAI carried proprietary hardware design methodologies and AI architecture details with them when they left. Apple argues that information, developed over years inside the company and covered by confidentiality agreements, was transferred in violation of those contracts.
But suits like this often include a secondary argument: that the defendant knew there was a problem and declined to address it. Apple’s complaint included that framing. The Wang-Chang email confusion now raises questions about how solid that secondary element actually is.
The mechanics of the mix-up appear straightforward. Two employees with phonetically and visually similar surnames, one spelled Wang and one Chang, worked at OpenAI in roles Apple was trying to reach. When the attorney drafted communications, the names got crossed. Correspondence went to an unintended recipient, and the exchange never properly connected. By the time the confusion was identified, the window for informal resolution had, in Apple’s view, already closed.
People familiar with OpenAI’s handling of the initial outreach told NBC News the company took Apple’s February contact seriously, reviewed it, and provided a response. That response, however, appears not to have reached the right people on Apple’s side, possibly because of the misdirected email chain. How much each party knew about what the other received remains a matter for discovery.
The Apple-OpenAI relationship has always carried an unusual tension. The two companies are simultaneously commercial partners, with Apple having integrated ChatGPT features directly into iOS, and legal adversaries. Apple’s hardware strategy and OpenAI’s ambitions in consumer AI overlap in ways both companies have tried to manage carefully. The lawsuit complicated that navigation considerably.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has not spoken publicly about the specific email incident. In broader public statements, he has argued that OpenAI competes on the strength of its own research and takes intellectual property obligations seriously. The lawsuit did not name him as a defendant.
Apple’s legal team has not addressed the Wang-Chang confusion in public filings or statements reviewed as of Monday. The company’s position, as laid out in the original complaint, is that the trade secret violations are the core issue and that the failure to respond to outreach was a secondary indicator of bad faith. Whether counsel can sustain that framing when the response arguably did exist, only reaching the wrong inbox, is a question for the litigation.
What the email confusion does not change is the underlying substance of the case. Apple still has to show what specific technical information left with the former employees, that it qualifies as a trade secret under applicable law, and that OpenAI knew or should have known the information was confidential when it arrived. Those elements require technical evidence and depositions that have nothing to do with who answered whose email in February.
NBC News reported that the email mix-up is one of several procedural stumbles that preceded the lawsuit’s filing, not the only breakdown, but a notable one given how cleanly it maps onto the specific claim Apple made about non-response.
There is no trial date set. The case remains in early stages, with discovery continuing. Courts are unlikely to dismiss a trade secret claim on the grounds of a confusing pre-litigation email exchange, but such details can color how judges and juries assess the credibility of each side’s broader narrative.
For Apple, the Wang-Chang episode may simply be an embarrassment, a human error that gave opponents a talking point. For OpenAI, it is evidence that the breakdown in communication was not willful avoidance but the predictable result of an imprecise legal outreach. The difference matters more in public perception than in courtrooms, at least for now.
One thing is no longer in dispute: when Apple reached out, OpenAI answered. What happened to that answer is, for the moment, the more interesting question.
