But what makes that necessary context? That can be communicated clearly without specifying Asian, „Apple confused 2 people with the same name“. Adding Asian sort of excuse Apple for the mistake, which is strange for OpenAI to do? I would tend to believe they are implying some casual racism
Because confusing two people because of having the same name is much less likely for European names than for Asian names (there are only about 100 Chinese family names, for instance), so it's an indirect dig that Apple wasn't paying attention (since they presumably employ a lot of Asians, and thus should know better). There's no need to bang on the racism drum, it's pretty tiring.
Upward of 40% Vietnamese have surname "Nguyen".
"Li" is quite popular in China.
Specifying "Asian last name" in this context is quite apt.