Apple sued OpenAI on Friday, July 10 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging trade secret misappropriation and breach of contract by an outfit that has quietly absorbed more than 400 of its former employees. The complaint reads less like a discovery dispute and more like a public-relations weapon aimed at the exact moment OpenAI needs quiet: the runway to its first hardware device and a prospective IPO.

The lead defendant 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’s filing accuses him of using Apple’s confidential project code names during recruiting and of coaching departing employees on how to evade Apple’s security procedures. The most vivid allegation is close to slapstick.

“He has directed job candidates still working for Apple to bring actual parts from Apple to their interviews for show and tell sessions in which he and his team at OpenAI can elicit still more Apple confidential information,” the complaint states.

The second named defendant, former senior systems electrical engineer Chang Liu, left for OpenAI in January 2026. Apple says he never returned his work laptop, ducked exit-interview requests, accessed a former colleague’s work computer after departing, and advised at least one Apple colleague on what to study for their OpenAI interview.

Threaded through the case is io Products, the design startup founded by Jony Ive that OpenAI acquired for $6.5 billion. Ive isn’t a defendant and isn’t accused of wrongdoing, but the filing frames io as the gravitational center pulling Apple’s iPhone design group apart. Apple claims it’s had to rebuild pieces of that team.

OpenAI’s response was terse. “We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets. We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.”

The backdrop matters. Apple’s fall 2026 Siri refresh will run on Google’s Gemini, not OpenAI’s models, so the partnership that once glued these two together is already brittle. And Apple’s supplier relationships across Asia are the sort of thing OpenAI’s hardware ambitions have to route through. This is Waymo v. Uber energy with a longer shadow: the incumbent using the courtroom to slow a challenger through the exact window when the challenger needs to look inevitable.

Sources