Apple sued OpenAI on Friday in the Northern District of California, alleging in a 41-page complaint that its former hardware talent has been feeding trade secrets into OpenAI’s device program “at every level, from members of its Technical Staff to its Chief Hardware Officer, and in coordination with business partners.” The complaint doesn’t read like a garden-variety talent-poaching grievance. It reads like Apple’s opening bid in a hardware cold war.

The named defendants tell the story. Tang Tan, OpenAI’s chief hardware officer, spent 24 years at Apple running product design for the iPhone and Apple Watch. Apple claims he directed employees interviewing at OpenAI to bring actual Apple parts for “show and tell sessions,” and used confidential Apple codenames during recruiting. Chang Liu, a former senior systems electrical engineer, allegedly exploited an authentication bug from a colleague’s Apple-issued laptop. The colleague, Yu-Ting “Alyssa” Peng, gets a cameo through a text thread the complaint reproduces. “LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny,” Liu wrote. Peng’s reply: “I’m ready.”

Apple says over 400 former employees now work at OpenAI, and describes the hardware business as “rotten to its core” and “normalized and exemplified by leadership.” IO Products, the Jony Ive design firm OpenAI bought at a $6.4 billion valuation (TechCrunch reports $6.5 billion), is accused of misleading an Apple supplier into running a confidential metal-finishing technique.

OpenAI’s response has stiffened. It first told Fortune it had “no interest in other companies’ trade secrets”; by Tuesday it was telling TechCrunch it was “not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit.”

Timing matters. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman broke the suit the same week OpenAI is prepping its IPO and reporting on a screen-free “humanlike AI companion” built by ex-Apple engineers. The 2024 ChatGPT-in-iOS deal has gone cold; Apple’s revamped Siri ships this fall on Google’s Gemini. What began as a partnership has become the defining hardware rivalry of the AI era, and Apple has decided to litigate the boundary itself.

Sources