Two years ago, Apple and OpenAI stood on the same stage, announcing that ChatGPT would soon live inside every iPhone. On Friday, they met in a different venue: the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where Apple filed a 41-page complaint accusing OpenAI of a coordinated, top-to-bottom campaign to steal the secrets of its unreleased hardware.
The lawsuit, which names OpenAI, the Jony Ive-cofounded design firm io Products, and two individual former Apple employees, alleges trade-secret misappropriation on a scale Apple describes as institutional. It is a striking escalation from a company famous for guarding its own secrets, and it recasts a frayed commercial partnership as open legal warfare over the physical future of AI.
The core allegation
"At every level, from members of its Technical Staff to its Chief Hardware Officer, and in coordination with business partners, OpenAI has been stealing Apple's trade secrets and confidential information," Apple wrote in the complaint. "OpenAI's nascent hardware business now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets."
Apple identifies five categories of allegedly stolen material: hardware architecture, manufacturing techniques, component technology, testing methodologies, and global supplier operations. The through-line is OpenAI's push into consumer devices, a strategy CEO Sam Altman has framed as building a new class of AI gadget to replace the smartphone. Apple's argument is blunt: that OpenAI's hardware ambitions were accelerated by taking what Apple spent years and billions building.
The named individuals
Two people are singled out. Chang Liu, a member of OpenAI's technical staff who spent roughly eight years at Apple as a senior electrical engineer before leaving in January 2026, allegedly kept a work-issued Apple laptop and later discovered an authentication flaw that still let him reach Apple's network file storage. According to the filing, Liu celebrated the access to a former colleague still at Apple: "LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny." Apple says he went on to download dozens of confidential files, many marked confidential, including technical specifications and engineering presentations for unreleased products, and that he coached an Apple employee on how to bypass the company's security teams when copying files.
The second is Tang Tan, OpenAI's chief hardware officer and a 24-year Apple veteran who rose to vice president of product design over the iPhone and Apple Watch before leaving in 2024 to cofound io Products. Apple accuses Tan of weaponizing the recruiting process, using confidential internal project codenames when interviewing Apple staff and directing candidates to bring "actual parts" for "show and tell" sessions, allegedly including batteries, main logic boards, shields, and systems-in-package. He is also accused of circulating a "Need to Know" Apple offboarding document to teach new OpenAI hires how to dodge Apple's exit-security checks. Ive, who now leads OpenAI's device work, is not named as a defendant.
The legal claims
Apple brings four claims under the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act and two breach-of-contract claims, invoking California's trade-secret regime alongside the DTSA. It is seeking preliminary and permanent injunctions, preservation and return of its materials, monetary damages, and a jury trial. In a statement, Apple said "significant evidence has emerged suggesting individuals employed by OpenAI wrongfully took Apple's secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes, and products," adding that protecting its intellectual property is "something we take very seriously."
OpenAI pushed back tersely. "We have no interest in other companies' trade secrets," the company said. "We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere."
The new front in the AI wars
For all its hardware-specific detail, the suit is really about people. Apple says more than 400 of its former employees now work at OpenAI, and the complaint reads as an argument that ordinary talent mobility crossed into misappropriation. That framing matters, because trade-secret litigation is fast becoming the AI industry's weapon of choice as the compute race gives way to a talent race. In June, a California judge dismissed a similar xAI suit accusing OpenAI of poaching an engineer to extract Grok secrets; Apple is betting its documentary evidence, the messages, the downloads, the offboarding memo, clears the bar xAI could not.
The irony is hard to miss. Apple and OpenAI announced their ChatGPT partnership in 2024; by January, Apple had turned to Google's Gemini to power Siri, and OpenAI had reportedly weighed its own breach-of-contract notice against Apple. Two former allies are now litigating the boundary between inspiration and theft, even as Apple prepares a CEO handoff from Tim Cook to John Ternus in September and OpenAI marches toward an IPO.
What to watch next
The near-term fight will be over a preliminary injunction: if Apple can convince a judge to restrict how OpenAI uses the disputed information, it could stall a device launch Altman wants out this year. Watch whether OpenAI moves to compel arbitration or countersues over the partnership, whether io Products' role widens the discovery fight, and whether any of the conduct draws criminal-referral interest. However it resolves, the case signals that in the AI arms race, the most valuable secrets may no longer be models, but the machines built to run them.
"At every level, from members of its Technical Staff to its Chief Hardware Officer, and in coordination with business partners, OpenAI has been stealing Apple's trade secrets and confidential information."— Apple, from its 41-page complaint