Apple filed a federal trade-secret lawsuit against OpenAI on Friday in the Northern District of California, accusing the AI company of running what the complaint describes as a coordinated top-to-bottom effort to siphon confidential product information out of Cupertino. “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,” the complaint reads.

The central figure is Tang Tan, OpenAI’s chief hardware officer and, until recently, a 24-year Apple veteran who ran product design for the iPhone and Apple Watch. Apple alleges Tan used confidential Apple project code names in OpenAI recruiting pitches and directed candidates still on Apple’s payroll to bring “actual parts” from their day jobs to interviews for “show and tell” sessions. A second defendant, former senior systems electrical engineer Chang Liu, spent 8 years at Apple before leaving for OpenAI in 2026; the complaint claims he never returned his Apple-issued laptop and used it to pull down technical specifications, engineering decks, and unannounced product data.

Then there’s the supply chain. Apple says OpenAI misled a manufacturing partner into believing it had Apple’s blessing to use a proprietary metal finishing technique. Cupertino wrote to OpenAI in February. It got no reply.

OpenAI’s response, delivered through spokesperson Drew Pusateri, was one sentence long: “We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets.”

The backdrop matters. Last year OpenAI announced its hardware ambitions and paid $6.4 billion for IO Products, the startup founded by former Apple designer Jony Ive and now named as a defendant. Apple, meanwhile, is shipping an updated Siri this fall built on Google’s Gemini models rather than anything from OpenAI. The old partnership is over, and the two companies are now direct competitors in consumer devices.

Apple wants an injunction, damages, and the return of the misappropriated materials. The bigger question is timing: OpenAI is reportedly preparing to go public in the coming months, and trade-secret discovery has a way of surfacing exactly the kind of internal correspondence that public-market underwriters prefer not to read for the first time in a prospectus. Litigation of this shape, filed by a plaintiff with Apple’s patience, tends to define the operating environment of the defendant for years.

Sources