Apple raises new concerns around clawing back trade secrets from an AI

Apple raised concerns in a recent filing that trade secrets fed into an AI agent or model could create an "irreversible" use of that information.

Abdul Saboor/Reuters Apple is suing OpenAI, alleging ex-employees used its trade secrets to benefit the company.

In a recent filing, Apple said trade secrets fed into an AI could create "irreversible" effects.

While legal remedies exist, the technical solution could be complicated, experts say.

Here's a novel problem companies may have to deal with in the AI era .

A nefarious Big Tech employee leaves for a competitor with trade secrets, feeds them to an AI agent or model while employed by the competitor, and runs some tests using those secrets.

Maybe the bad-apple employee then creates a new solution using that confidential knowledge, which the competitor benefits from.

Or perhaps those secrets are stored in some knowledge base that an AI could retrieve if the nefarious employees' colleagues have a relevant question.

Apple raised that possibility in a supplemental brief filed Monday in support of its request for expedited discovery in its trade-secret lawsuit against OpenAI .

In the filing, Apple's attorneys said a former employee's use of company secrets while employed by OpenAI and his "use of AI agents to learn to run simulations raise concerns extending beyond ordinary document theft." "Where trade secret information is fed into an AI agent or model that 'learns' from it, such 'learning' may create irreversible and continually propagating uses of the trade secret — harm that, at a minimum, is uniquely challenging to undo and requires prompt investigation," Apple's lawyers wrote.

The continued use of confidential information by a rival company is not a new problem.

Artificial intelligence , however, is introducing a new wrinkle to the matter: How should companies regain control of their secrets after they've entered an AI system at a competing organization? New risk, same remedies "Employees are already real loose cannons, walking around with knowledge in their heads," Camilla Hrdy, a law professor at Rutgers whose work examines trade-secret law and generative AI , told Business Insider.

"Now they're taking that knowledge and plugging it into AI, and that could be a real loss of control.

That is new." Elon Musk's xAI raised a related but distinct AI-linked concern when it sued OpenAI, accusing Sam Altman's company of poaching staff to steal Grok's underlying technology .