Inside Apple's Trade-Secrets Lawsuit Against OpenAI

On July 10, 2026, Apple filed a 41-page complaint in the Northern District of California. It brings four counts under the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act plus two breach-of-contract claims, and asks for injunctions, the return of information, and punitive damages for willful conduct. The defendants are two OpenAI entities, the hardware startup io Products (Jony Ive's company, acquired by OpenAI in 2025 for roughly $6.4-6.5 billion), and two named individuals.

The angle worth reading is the shape of the accusation. Apple isn't complaining that OpenAI hired its people. It says OpenAI ran an institutional campaign to pull unreleased hardware secrets out of Apple through departing employees, its own interview process, and a shared supplier, all to jump-start OpenAI's first consumer device.

Notably, Jony Ive himself is not a defendant. Everything below is drawn from Apple's complaint and is unproven in court as of mid-July 2026. OpenAI has filed appearances and its case management conference is set for October 13, 2026.

Chang Liu spent 8 years on Apple's iPhone team as a senior system electrical engineer, then left for OpenAI in January 2026. Apple says he never returned his work laptop and skipped his exit interview. He then allegedly used a former colleague's Apple laptop to reach the network and stumbled onto an authentication bug that still let him into Apple's shared file storage after he was gone.

Over several weeks he allegedly pulled down dozens of confidential files, engineering presentations, technical specs, unreleased product details, with one collection running past 1,000 pages. Apple quotes a message he sent a former colleague about the open door he'd found.

The complaint goes further: Apple says Liu coached a colleague he was recruiting on how to copy files without tripping the security team, told her which confidential documents to study before her OpenAI interview, and directed her to move their chat off Apple devices to the LINE app. She later joined OpenAI too.

Tang Yew Tan is OpenAI's Chief Hardware Officer and a 24-year Apple veteran who ran product design for iPhone and Apple Watch. Before he left, Apple says, he emailed himself information about Apple's suppliers and internal industry summaries.

The interviews themselves are the sharper allegation. Tan allegedly used Apple's internal project codenames to draw details out of current Apple employees, required them to prepare "Technical Deep Dive" talks on vendors and integration, and told candidates still working at Apple to bring actual parts for a "show and tell."

Apple also says Tan kept an internal document marked "need to know" that described how Apple monitors departing staff, and shared it with recruits to help them dodge exit protocols. In one instance pulled from server logs, an employee began screenshotting files about a highly confidential project in the hours before an OpenAI interview, and during that interview Tan allegedly asked about that same project.

The allegations reach past employees. Apple says OpenAI approached one of Apple's own manufacturing partners and got it to carry out a proprietary metal-finishing technique Apple invented, while "misleading the partner to believe they had Apple's permission to do so." That moves the story from what people carried out the door to what a shared supplier was talked into doing.

Apple notes that more than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI, and its position is blunt: employing people once entrusted with its secrets "does not entitle OpenAI to use that information to jumpstart its hardware efforts." Apple calls what it has found so far the "tip of the iceberg," since it "lacks visibility into what's been happening behind closed doors at OpenAI."

The two companies were partners barely two years ago. At WWDC in June 2024, Apple put ChatGPT inside Siri and Sam Altman turned up in Cupertino. Apple says it opened an internal investigation in February 2026, sent OpenAI a formal letter asking what it was doing to stop confidential information from flowing in, and got no response. By June 2026, Apple's long-delayed Siri overhaul shipped running on Google's Gemini instead.

Stanford's Mark Lemley points out the core tension: hiring a competitor's staff is legal in California, but if the employees took documents and OpenAI used them, "that is a problem for OpenAI." OpenAI's only public comment came from spokesperson Drew Pusateri on X.

The timing raises the stakes. OpenAI has confidentially filed S-1 paperwork toward a possible IPO, its CFO said consumer hardware would ship by the end of 2026, and analysts note that even unproven, the suit could stall those plans. Apple stresses the separate ChatGPT-in-Siri integration is not what this case challenges.