Apple sued OpenAI on Friday in the Northern District of California, alleging in a 41-page federal complaint that the AI company built its hardware ambitions by systematically pulling trade secrets out of Cupertino through former employees, supplier relationships, and its acquisition of io Products. The filing names Tang Tan, OpenAI’s Chief Hardware Officer and a former Apple vice president who oversaw iPhone and Apple Watch product design across roughly 24 years at the company, as the central figure in what Apple frames as a coordinated campaign.

The language is unusually direct. OpenAI, the complaint says, has been operating “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,” and its “nascent hardware business” rests “on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets.” An Apple representative told CNBC that “significant evidence has emerged suggesting individuals employed by OpenAI wrongfully took Apple’s secret and confidential information.”

The specific allegations are the sort that read well to a jury. Tan, who left Apple in 2024 for io Products (the Jony Ive-cofounded hardware firm OpenAI later acquired in a deal valued at $6.4 billion per CNBC, $6.5 billion per Reuters), allegedly used confidential Apple codenames during recruiting and, per the filing, “He has directed job candidates still working for Apple to bring actual parts from Apple to their interviews for show and tell sessions.” Another former employee, Chang Liu, is accused of walking out with an Apple laptop. OpenAI is alleged to have coached departing staff on evading Apple’s security processes, and to have asked a hardware supplier to execute a metal-finishing technique Apple invented while misleading the partner into believing OpenAI had permission.

OpenAI, in a statement to Reuters and Fortune, said: “We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets. We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.”

The timing is its own story. In 2024 Apple and OpenAI announced ChatGPT integration into Siri and Apple Intelligence; by this fall, Apple’s updated Siri will run on Google’s Gemini models instead. Reuters reported in May that OpenAI had been weighing its own legal options against Apple. In September, Timothy D. Cook hands the CEO seat to John Ternus. And OpenAI is preparing an IPO.

Camilla Hrdy, a Rutgers Law School professor, noted to Reuters that the case is unusually complex because prior AI trade-secret litigation has almost entirely concerned software, not hardware. That’s the deeper stake here. Software provenance can be argued in the abstract; a metal-finishing process and a physical part on an interview table can’t. Apple has picked the battleground it knows.

Sources