Apple has filed a blockbuster lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the AI startup of orchestrating a systematic campaign to steal confidential hardware designs, technical specifications, and supply chain secrets — all in service of building its own line of AI-powered devices. The suit, filed July 10 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, may be the most consequential intellectual property battle in Silicon Valley’s recent history.
A 41-Page Complaint and a Damning Accusation
The filing runs 41 pages and does not mince words. “At every level,” Apple states, “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.”
Apple is pursuing charges of trade secret misappropriation and breach of contract, and it is seeking damages, injunctions, and a court order forcing OpenAI to stop using any information it allegedly extracted from Apple’s ranks. More than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI — a number Apple frames not as ordinary talent movement in a competitive industry, but as evidence of a deliberate, coordinated extraction operation.
The Accused: A Hardware Chief and a Rogue Laptop
Two individuals are named alongside OpenAI as defendants: Tang Tan and Chang Liu.
Tang Tan is OpenAI’s Chief Hardware Officer and a former Apple vice president who spent years leading product design for the iPhone and Apple Watch. According to the complaint, Tan actively instructed Apple employees who were interviewing at OpenAI to bring “actual parts” from Apple’s labs to their interviews for what he called “show and tell” sessions — moments during which he and his team could extract confidential hardware information from candidates still bound by Apple’s nondisclosure agreements.
Chang Liu is a former senior systems electrical engineer at Apple who left for OpenAI in January 2026. Apple says Liu never returned his company-issued laptop, ignored Apple’s requests to schedule an exit interview, and refused to sign a confidentiality reminder. The suit alleges he used that Apple laptop to download confidential technical documents after his departure, and later accessed a former colleague’s Apple workstation without authorization.
Jony Ive’s Firm Is Also Named
Also listed in the complaint is io Products, the hardware design company co-founded by Jony Ive, Apple’s legendary former design chief. OpenAI acquired io Products last year for approximately $6.4 billion. Ive himself is not named as a defendant and is not accused of wrongdoing, but the inclusion of io Products pulls his acquisition squarely into the dispute.
Apple’s lawyers describe OpenAI’s hardware ambitions as “rotten to its core” — a pointed phrase that doubles as a play on Apple’s most iconic symbol.
Why This Lawsuit Matters
For years, OpenAI and Apple maintained an uneasy but functional relationship. Apple embedded ChatGPT integrations into iOS 18, acknowledging the value of OpenAI’s language capabilities while keeping core AI development in-house. That partnership now looks like a cautionary tale.
For OpenAI, the lawsuit arrives at a particularly sensitive moment. The company is reportedly preparing a confidential IPO filing with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, targeting a public debut as soon as September 2026 at a private-market valuation of around $730 billion. A sprawling trade secret litigation involving Apple is precisely the kind of legal overhang that complicates a roadshow narrative.
OpenAI Pushes Back
OpenAI issued a brief statement in response: “We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets. We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.”
A New Front in the AI Hardware Wars
What makes this case significant is what it signals about the AI hardware race broadly. As companies like OpenAI move beyond software into physical products, the fight for talent becomes a fight over secrets, and those fights increasingly end in court.
Apple built its hardware dominance over decades through obsessive secrecy, vertically integrated design, and supply chain mastery. The lawsuit argues that OpenAI tried to buy a shortcut to those advantages — not through innovation, but through a systematic raid on Apple’s institutional knowledge.
Whether a court ultimately agrees will play out over months or years. But the filing alone reshapes the relationship between two of the most powerful companies in technology, and raises uncomfortable questions about how the AI hardware industry has been built.
