Apple sued OpenAI on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging in a 41-page complaint that OpenAI’s Chief Hardware Officer Tang Tan and former Apple engineer Chang Liu directed a coordinated scheme to steal unreleased-product designs, supply-chain intelligence and manufacturing techniques for OpenAI’s forthcoming hardware device. The filing reframes what had been a marquee partnership, the 2024 deal that put ChatGPT inside iOS, as the cover story for what Apple now calls industrial espionage.
The language is unusually blunt for a Cupertino pleading. “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 writes, describing OpenAI’s “nascent hardware business” as “rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets.”
Tan spent 24 years at Apple, most recently as Vice President of Product Design for iPhone and Apple Watch. Liu, a senior systems electrical engineer, spent 8 years there before leaving for OpenAI in 2026. According to the complaint as reported by TechCrunch, Tan used confidential Apple project code names while recruiting, instructed candidates to bring physical hardware components to interviews for “show and tell sessions,” and coached departing employees on evading Apple’s exit-security procedures. Liu allegedly failed to return his company laptop and used it to download confidential documents. OpenAI, Apple says, then applied a proprietary Apple metal-finishing technique through a shared manufacturing partner after misleading the vendor into believing it had Apple’s authorization.
Apple wrote to OpenAI in February raising these concerns and, per the filing, got no response.
OpenAI’s reply is a single sentence. “We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets. We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.”
The context around the suit is what makes it structurally interesting. OpenAI acquired Jony Ive’s design firm io Products last year. Sam Altman said in November 2025 that the company had completed its first hardware prototypes, though no product or ship date has been announced. In June, a California judge dismissed xAI’s trade-secret suit against OpenAI, which had involved an alleged Grok engineer poach. Apple’s complaint lands two months later, with io Products named as a co-defendant alongside Tan and Liu.
The commercial subtext is louder still. Apple’s refreshed Siri, due this fall, is built on Google’s Gemini, not OpenAI models. Apple declined to say whether the litigation affects the ChatGPT-iOS arrangement, but the answer is written into the pleading itself: a company that publicly accuses its partner of running espionage through its former hardware chief isn’t planning to renew.
For a decade Apple’s hardware moat has been treated as durable because the institutional knowledge sat inside a single building in Cupertino. The lawsuit is Apple’s admission that the building has doors, and that its most valuable people are now walking through them toward a company that hasn’t shipped a device yet.
Sources
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-10/apple-sues-openai-for-trade-secret-theft-in-blockbuster-case
- https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/10/apple-openai-lawsuit-trade-secrets.html
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/10/apple-sues-openai-over-alleged-trade-secret-theft/
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/07/10/apple-sues-openai-alleging-ai-company-stole-trade-secrets/
- https://fortune.com/2026/07/10/apple-openai-lawsuit-trade-secrets-theft-allegations/