Twitter has issued a warning to Meta, the parent company of Instagram, threatening legal action over its newly introduced text-based application called Threads.

In a letter sent by Twitter's lawyer, Alex Spiro, to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter accused Meta of poaching former employees to create a "copycat" app and engaging in the unlawful misappropriation of trade secrets and intellectual property.

According to Spiro's letter, Twitter intended to enforce its intellectual property rights and demanded that Meta immediately cease using any Twitter trade secrets or confidential information.

The letter, obtained exclusively by Semafor, stated that Twitter reserves all rights to pursue civil remedies and seek injunctive relief without further notice in order to prevent the retention, disclosure, or use of its intellectual property by Meta.

Spiro further alleged that Meta hired numerous former Twitter employees who had access to Twitter's trade secrets and confidential information.

He claimed that these employees were deliberately assigned to develop Meta's Threads app with the explicit intent of utilizing Twitter's trade secrets and intellectual property, thereby violating both state and federal laws, as well as their ongoing obligations to Twitter.

In response, Andy Stone, Meta's communications director, dismissed Twitter's accusations, stating that no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee. Stone asserts that the allegations made by Twitter are baseless and untrue.

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, weighed in on the situation through a tweet posted after the initial publication of this story on Thursday.

Musk stated, "Competition is fine, cheating is not."