Apple sued OpenAI in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Friday, accusing the AI company of orchestrating a systematic effort to poach engineers, siphon confidential files, and pressure outside manufacturers into replicating Apple’s proprietary techniques. “This case is about Apple’s former employees stealing Apple’s trade secrets for the benefit of OpenAI. Apple brings this suit to put a stop to it,” Apple’s lawyers wrote in the complaint. The filing arrives while OpenAI prepares for an expected IPO and roughly two months after the company won a federal jury verdict against Elon Musk.

The complaint’s two central figures once worked in Cupertino. Tang Tan, now OpenAI’s chief hardware officer, spent 24 years at Apple, most recently as vice president of product design for iPhone and Apple Watch. Chang Liu, a former senior systems electrical engineer, spent 8 years there before leaving for OpenAI in January 2026 without returning his company laptop. Apple says Liu ignored requests to schedule an exit interview and used the retained machine to download dozens of confidential hardware files, including engineering presentations and specs for unreleased products. He also accessed a former colleague’s work computer after his departure, the filing alleges.

Tan’s role, as Apple tells it, was structural. The complaint says he used confidential Apple project code names during OpenAI’s recruiting process, directed candidates still employed by Apple to bring physical components to interviews for “show and tell sessions,” and coached departing employees on how to evade Apple’s exit-security procedures. The scheme, Apple’s lawyers write, operated “at every level, from members of its Technical Staff to its Chief Hardware Officer, and in coordination with business partners.”

That last clause matters. Apple alleges OpenAI asked outside hardware manufacturers to execute a proprietary metal-finishing technique it invented, “misleading the partner to believe they had Apple’s permission to do so.” Apple wrote to OpenAI in February 2026 raising the concern. It received no reply.

OpenAI spokesman Drew Pusateri said the company “has no interest in other companies’ trade secrets” and is “focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.”

The subtext is a consumer device. OpenAI paid $6.4 billion to acquire IO Products from Jony Ive, and the hardware ambitions have been an open secret since. The commercial backdrop is already frosty: Apple integrated ChatGPT into its operating system in 2024, then announced in January 2026 that its revised Siri would run on Google’s Gemini instead. In May, Bloomberg reported OpenAI had considered suing Apple for breach of contract over insufficient promotion of ChatGPT across Apple devices.

The 2024 partnership, in other words, was already a marriage of convenience. Friday’s filing turns it into discovery.

Sources