SAN FRANCISCO – The rivalry between Apple and OpenAI moved into federal court on Friday when Apple filed a lawsuit accusing the ChatGPT maker of running a trade secret theft operation it described as normalized inside the company – orchestrated, its own complaint states, at “every level” of OpenAI’s senior leadership.
The suit, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, names two individuals alongside OpenAI: Tang Tan, OpenAI’s chief hardware officer and a 24-year Apple veteran, and Chang Liu, a senior systems electrical engineer who left Apple for OpenAI earlier this year. Apple is accusing both men of trade secret misappropriation and breach of contract, and asked the court to bar OpenAI from using any confidential information it may have obtained through them.
Tan is the central figure in Apple’s account of how the alleged scheme worked. During nearly a quarter century at Apple – where he served as vice president of product design overseeing the iPhone and the Apple Watch – Tan became one of the most knowledgeable people in the world about the company’s unannounced hardware roadmap. When he departed for OpenAI, Apple claims, he did not merely carry his own expertise. The complaint alleges he used Apple’s internal project code names during recruiting conversations, coached engineers who were planning to leave on how to avoid Apple’s security exit procedures, and explicitly asked job candidates – in Apple’s telling – to bring Apple hardware prototypes to their interviews with him. Physical prototype devices, the kind Apple guards more carefully than almost anything else it owns.
The language Apple’s lawyers chose is pointed. OpenAI was “telling recruits to bring Apple prototypes to interviews,” the complaint states, a formulation that implies this was organizational practice rather than individual improvisation. Apple’s filing describes the alleged misconduct as having reached through OpenAI’s senior leadership “at every level.”
Chang Liu’s alleged role is narrower but not incidental. He failed to return an Apple-issued laptop upon resigning, downloaded confidential technical presentations and engineering documents onto it before leaving, and shared Apple’s confidential information with other applicants during the recruitment process. That last allegation is significant: Liu is accused not merely of retaining materials but of actively distributing them to prospective OpenAI employees as they moved through the hiring pipeline.
Apple acknowledged in the filing that it does not know the full scope of what OpenAI received. “This is the tip of the iceberg,” the company stated. “Apple lacks visibility into what’s happening behind closed doors at OpenAI, where such misconduct is normalized.” The company filed a trade secret case while openly admitting it cannot yet quantify the harm, because that harm may still be accumulating inside a competitor’s walls. TechCrunch reported the details of the complaint on Friday as the filing became public.
The timing of the lawsuit is not coincidental. OpenAI is developing what appears to be its first consumer hardware product through io, the design studio founded by Jony Ive – the former Apple chief design officer whose three decades of work produced the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. OpenAI acquired io last year for $6.5 billion. The device has not been publicly announced; industry reporting has described it as a product built around AI agents rather than conventional apps, a potential challenger to the smartphone as the primary personal computing device. Ive is not named in Apple’s lawsuit.
If Tang Tan arrived at OpenAI carrying confidential knowledge of Apple’s hardware development pipeline – the component choices, engineering tradeoffs, and form factors of products planned for release two or three years out – the implications for a competitor building a device designed to displace the iPhone are not subtle. Apple is not alleging that OpenAI benefited from trade secrets in a narrow or historical sense. It is alleging that its future roadmap may now be visible to the company competing most directly for the same customers.
OpenAI has navigated high-stakes litigation before. In May, a federal jury rejected Elon Musk’s $150 billion lawsuit against the company, a case that challenged OpenAI’s conversion from a nonprofit research organization into a commercial enterprise. Jurors found for OpenAI on the central claims after weeks of testimony involving the most prominent figures in AI. The Apple case raises different questions – these concern what specific individuals did with specific materials – but the legal environment is familiar to a company that just emerged from a San Francisco courtroom with its structure intact.
The Apple-OpenAI commercial relationship adds a layer of complexity that the lawsuit does not address. Apple integrated ChatGPT into its Siri product as part of the Apple Intelligence rollout, a partnership that acknowledged OpenAI’s lead in conversational AI while keeping the two companies in a revenue-sharing arrangement rather than a competitive one. That partnership is not mentioned in the complaint. Apple appears to have separated the commercial arrangement from the legal dispute, at least in how it has chosen to frame the case in court filings. Whether the lawsuit changes the operational terms of their partnership has not been addressed by either company publicly. As this publication previously reported, OpenAI has separately been exploring a proposal to donate five percent of its equity to a US sovereign wealth fund, a move designed to secure good relations with the Trump administration – the same administration whose courts will now adjudicate Apple’s claims against the company.
Apple asked the court for emergency relief to preserve evidence, an injunction barring OpenAI from using its confidential information, the return of all confidential materials, and compensatory and punitive damages to be determined at trial. OpenAI had not filed a response as of late Friday.
What the filing cannot settle is the uncertainty it names directly. If the information Tan allegedly brought with him, or that Liu allegedly distributed, has been incorporated into OpenAI’s unreleased hardware development – the design decisions, the component strategy, the product architecture – Apple may find itself competing against a device shaped in part by knowledge its own engineers created. The company has raised that possibility in a federal complaint while acknowledging it does not yet have the answer. Whether the court provides one before OpenAI’s device ever reaches consumers remains to be seen.
