Apple filed a 41-page trade-secret complaint against OpenAI on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, naming OpenAI’s chief hardware officer Tang Tan, former Apple engineer Chang Liu, and Jony Ive’s io Products, the hardware startup OpenAI bought last year for $6.4 billion. The filing accuses the defendants of a coordinated scheme to lift confidential iPhone design work into an unreleased OpenAI device expected to debut later this year.

The language is unusually direct for an Apple pleading. OpenAI, the complaint alleges, has been stealing trade secrets “at every level, from members of its Technical Staff to its Chief Hardware Officer, and in coordination with business partners.” Tan, who spent 24 years at Apple running product design for the iPhone and Apple Watch before crossing over, is the vertical spine of that claim. Liu, who left in January 2026, is the horizontal one: Apple says he downloaded dozens of confidential hardware files on his way out. OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri responded, “We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets.”

Apple sent a concerns letter in February 2026 and, according to the complaint, got nothing back. Five months of silence became a lawsuit.

The suit also functionally terminates whatever remained of the 2024 pact that put ChatGPT inside Apple Intelligence, an arrangement Bloomberg reported was already under legal review in May. Cupertino spent a decade watching senior hardware talent walk to smaller, faster shops. It’s now using the discovery process as the enforcement layer its non-competes couldn’t be, right as OpenAI approaches an IPO window in which litigation exposure gets priced in the S-1.

Sources

Sources