Apple sued OpenAI on Friday in the Northern District of California, alleging a coordinated raid on the trade secrets behind its unreleased consumer hardware. The complaint, first reported by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, accuses OpenAI of poaching Apple staff “at every level, from members of its Technical Staff to its Chief Hardware Officer” and building a device program on the intelligence they carried out the door.

The two named defendants tell the structural story. Tang Tan, now OpenAI’s Chief Hardware Officer, spent 24 years at Apple running product design for the iPhone and Apple Watch before defecting. Apple’s filing, as quoted by CNBC, alleges Tan used internal project codenames while recruiting and directed job candidates still working at Apple to bring “actual parts from Apple to their interviews for show and tell sessions.” Axios reports he also circulated an internal “Need to Know” offboarding document coaching new hires on how to dodge Apple’s exit-security checks.

The second defendant is Chang Liu, a senior systems electrical engineer who spent 8 years at Apple before leaving for OpenAI in January 2026. Apple says Liu never returned his work laptop and used it to download dozens of confidential files covering unreleased products, engineering presentations, and technical specs. The filing cites a message Liu sent a former colleague: “LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny.”

IO Products, Jony Ive’s hardware startup acquired by OpenAI for $6.4 billion, is named as a co-defendant. Ive himself isn’t.

OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said, “We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets.”

Apple is seeking damages, injunctions barring OpenAI from using the material, the return of confidential documents, and preservation of evidence. It also effectively terminates the 2024 partnership that put ChatGPT inside iOS; the revamped Siri due this fall will run on Google Gemini instead.

The timing is its own commentary. OpenAI’s policy chief Chris Lehane promised Axios in January that the company’s first device would ship in the first half of 2026. That window has passed. The suit now lands weeks before OpenAI’s expected IPO, converting a hardware delay into a disclosure problem and reframing a two-year partnership as the reconnaissance phase of a competitor.

Sources