Apple Lawsuit Filing Accuses OpenAI of Stealing Trade Secrets

Apple's lawsuit against OpenAI landed in federal court in California on Friday, accusing the AI company of building its secretive hardware business on stolen trade secrets. The apple lawsuit filing names two former Apple engineers and a company OpenAI acquired, marking one of the sharpest breaks yet between two firms that only recently called each other partners.

What the Apple lawsuit filing actually alleges

Apple's complaint describes what it calls a coordinated pattern of misconduct at an institutional level, arguing that OpenAI's push into consumer hardware depends on information its former employees were never supposed to take with them. The suit names Tang Tan, who worked on the iPhone, Apple Watch and iPod before becoming OpenAI's chief hardware officer, along with Chang Liu, a former Apple electrical engineer who joined OpenAI earlier this year. Apple claims Liu accessed and downloaded confidential hardware files using an Apple issued device he kept after leaving the company. It also alleges Tan told job candidates still employed at Apple to bring actual parts from Apple to their OpenAI interviews.

Apple says it opened an internal investigation and reached out to OpenAI in February with its concerns, only to get no response. The filing also names io Products, the hardware startup OpenAI folded into its operations, as a defendant. Apple's language is blunt: it describes OpenAI's hardware unit as resting on the shakiest of foundations because of what it calls illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets. An Apple spokesperson said the company will defend its teams' work and is taking all appropriate steps to do so. OpenAI had not responded to requests for comment as of Friday.

A 2024 partnership that curdled into competition

The two companies were on far friendlier terms not long ago. Apple turned to OpenAI in 2024 after falling behind in the generative AI race that ChatGPT touched off, striking a deal to route certain Siri queries to ChatGPT when Apple's own system came up short. That arrangement still exists on iPhones today, but the broader relationship has shifted toward direct competition.

The turning point was OpenAI's recruitment of Jony Ive, Apple's former chief design officer, to lead a project building an AI native device that some analysts think could eventually compete with the iPhone itself. Last year OpenAI disclosed it was collaborating with Ive on hardware meant to offer a new way of interacting with AI, one that moves past screens and apps. That collaboration led OpenAI to acquire io Products, a firm Ive co founded along with Tan and two others, in a deal valued near $6.5 billion.

That acquisition already had legal baggage attached to it. A smaller startup called iyO Inc. sued Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over trademark infringement, citing the similarity between io and iyO and prior contact between the companies. iyO separately sued a former employee for allegedly leaking a confidential drawing of its unreleased product and later added trade secret claims against Tan to that same case. Apple's new filing runs on a parallel track, but its target is squarely OpenAI's hardware ambitions rather than a naming dispute.

OpenAI's device push faces new legal exposure

OpenAI has never disclosed exactly what its device looks like or does, describing it only as an attempt to go beyond traditional products and interfaces, the same territory Amazon and Google entered a decade ago with screen free smart speakers. Chief financial officer Sarah Friar told the Associated Press in April that consumer hardware would arrive toward the end of this year, even after OpenAI trimmed other side projects to refocus on ChatGPT.

The timing complicates things. OpenAI has been weighing a public listing on Wall Street while fending off intensifying competition from Anthropic and Google, and a trade secrets suit from one of the most litigious and well resourced companies in tech adds a new variable to that calculus. Apple's filing effectively puts a legal cloud over the hardware unit just as OpenAI is trying to convince investors, and eventually the public market, that its ambitions beyond chatbots are credible and clean.