Apple is outright going for corporate espionage claims. They can also fall back to the CFAA and push for criminal prosecution of former employees individually.
Despite being based on a Musk tantrum it made it all the way to a jury trial, where Elon lost. Apple can sue over a lot of things, but seeing these chat messages and incompetent lawyer outreach does raise the possibility that this is based on an Apple tantrum as well. Which is exactly what OpenAI is implying.
Apple asked for expedited discovery, I guess you could say OpenAI obliged ;-)
Apple is outright going for corporate espionage claims. They can also fall back to the CFAA and push for criminal prosecution of former employees individually.