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- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is a self-described "mega Apple fanboy."
- Altman said he was "very sad" to see Apple sue OpenAI.
- The legal fight illustrates how frayed the relationship between the two companies has become.
Sam Altman'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 told tech journalist Alex Heath during a recent interview.
In July, Apple sued OpenAI, accusing the ChatGPT creator of a "coordinated pattern of misconduct at an institutional level" to steal Apple's closely held secrets. OpenAI has said it has "no interest in other companies' trade secrets" and that the lawsuit doesn't live up to Apple's "reputation for obsessing over the smallest details."
Altman said when he first heard about the suit, he thought something had gone significantly wrong.
"When I first heard about it, I was like, 'Man, this sounds egregious. Someone must have done something badly,'" Altman said. "We don't want any company's IP, and we certainly don't want people who are going to take a company's IP and bring it to us."
Altman is barely mentioned in Apple's initial 40-page complaint, which, in addition to various corporate entities, directly named only two OpenAI employees, Chang Liu and Tang Tan, both of whom formerly worked for Apple, as defendants. Apple's suit said Liu and Tan took or retained confidential information when they left the company and, in some instances, asked current Apple employees about unannounced products.
The lawsuit marks a dramatic turn from what had once been a major partnership.
In June 2024, Altman went to Cupertino to announce that Apple would integrate ChatGPT across its products.
Their cooperation has frayed as OpenAI has entered the consumer space Apple has long dominated. Less than a year after speaking at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, Altman and iPhone designer Jony Ive announced that they had been collaborating for years and that OpenAI would acquire Ive's startup IO for nearly $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 Apple is trying to delay OpenAI's hardware "because it fears OpenAI's product might reduce demand for Apple's."
The Apple of his eye
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Altman's love for Apple is well documented.
In 2008, he demoed Loopt, the location-based social networking app he cofounded, at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference. Altman said getting up onstage required 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 that much anxiety.
"It was like Steve Jobs, you know," Altman said in 2015, recalling how he grew up viewing Jobs as an iconic figure.
Altman said growing up, his first computer was a Macintosh LC II. In 2024, he told Bill Gates that he still owns it and it still works. When Altman announced his partnership with Ive, he cited his hope to bring "some of the delight, wonder and creative spirit that I first felt using an Apple Computer 30 years ago."
Speaking 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 does not own a stake in OpenAI, built his fortune largely through investments in companies including Stripe and Reddit. His grandma gave him what may have been one of his first tech investments.
In a 2016 interview, he conducted with his brother Jack, the pair recalled how, for their birthdays, their grandma gave them equal shares in companies she thought they would like. Jack was given Applebee's, while Sam received Apple.
"I still have those Apple shares marked in my brokerage account as 'Grandma's birthday Apple shares,' Sam Altman said, adding, "I'm going to keep them."