Apple sues Open AI, accusing it of stealing trade secrets

Ronni Holmvig Strøm · 2026-07-12

Apple sued OpenAI on Friday in the Northern District of California, and the striking thing about the complaint is what it barely mentions. There is almost nothing in it about artificial intelligence. Apple's grievance is about atoms: parts carried into interviews, a metal finishing technique, an

Apple sued OpenAI on Friday in the Northern District of California, and the striking thing about the complaint is what it barely mentions. There is almost nothing in it about artificial intelligence. Apple's grievance is about atoms: parts carried into interviews, a metal finishing technique, an unreturned laptop, the physical craft of turning a design into a shippable object. The most closely watched AI company in the world is being sued over industrial design.

The Suit Lives in the World OpenAI Just Entered

Apple names two former employees. Tang Tan, now OpenAI's chief hardware officer, spent 24 years at Apple as a VP of product design. The filing says he directed candidates still working at Apple to bring "actual parts" to "show and tell" interviews and used Apple project code names in recruiting. Chang Liu, a former senior systems electrical engineer, allegedly kept an Apple-issued laptop and used it to download confidential technical documents. Apple also claims OpenAI asked a manufacturing partner to run a proprietary metal finishing technique while "misleading the partner to believe they had Apple's permission to do so."

The grievance is the discipline of getting a design out of the studio and onto a production line, not model weights or training data. Apple has spent forty years perfecting that discipline, and OpenAI has spent about a year acquiring it. OpenAI bought Jony Ive's device startup, io, for roughly $6.5 billion last year and said in November that its first prototypes were finished. The moment you decide to build a device, you inherit Apple's rulebook, and Apple's litigators.

Trade Secrets Are How You Sue People You Cannot Stop From Leaving

The number sitting in the filing is 400: more than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI. Apple is not suing over the departures. California bans non-competes, and engineers are free to walk across town carrying everything in their heads. Trade secret law is the one lever a California company has left, and it turns on a fine distinction. What an engineer knows is theirs. What an engineer copies is not.

That is why the specific acts matter more than the head count. A résumé and a trained instinct travel legally. "Actual parts" carried into an interview, a laptop full of documents, a partner told to run a secret process, these are the acts that, if proven, cross from knowledge into property. Apple says it sent a letter in February and got no reply. The lawsuit is the escalation.

Apple Does Not Litigate This Hot Against Companies It Ignores

The language is unusually warm for a legal filing. OpenAI's hardware business, Apple writes, "now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core." Apple wants damages, a jury, and an injunction that would force OpenAI to redesign products. The timing is pointed. OpenAI is preparing for what is expected to be one of the largest IPOs in the industry's history, and open-ended discovery into an unreleased product is exactly the kind of risk that unsettles a roadmap.