Apple Sued Its Own AI Partner for Stealing Hardware Secrets

Apple filed suit against OpenAI on July 11 in Northern California federal court, alleging trade secret theft coordinated "at every level" of the AI company. The complaint names Tang Tan, OpenAI's Chief Hardware Officer, and engineer Chang Liu. It also names io Products, the hardware startup co-founded by Tan and Jony Ive that OpenAI acquired last year. Jony Ive is not named in the suit. ChatGPT remains embedded in Apple Intelligence.

That last sentence is the one worth sitting with.

The specific allegations are vivid in the way that suggests someone was keeping receipts for a while. Apple says Tan used internal Apple code names during OpenAI recruiting sessions to coax more confidential information out of candidates who still worked at Apple. He allegedly told those candidates to bring in actual hardware parts, batteries, logic boards, system-in-package chips, for "show and tell" at their interviews. He also circulated what the complaint calls an Apple offboarding document, apparently retained or obtained after his own departure, teaching new OpenAI hires how to evade Apple's exit security procedures.

Chang Liu's role is more straightforward, and in some ways more damning precisely because it's so mundane. He left Apple in 2026, failed to return a company-issued laptop, and used that laptop to download dozens of confidential files, many of them marked as such. He then allegedly advised other Apple employees applying to OpenAI on what to study before their interviews.

Apple sent a letter to OpenAI in February laying out its concerns. OpenAI did not respond. Apple filed suit five months later.

OpenAI's public response was brief: "We have no interest in other companies' trade secrets." That's a denial, not a rebuttal.

The backdrop matters here. OpenAI has been building toward a consumer hardware launch for over a year. Altman confirmed prototype devices in November. The io Products acquisition was announced in May 2025. What Apple is alleging is that while this hardware effort was taking shape, OpenAI was systematically pulling trade secrets about Apple's own unannounced devices out through the people it hired away from Cupertino. More than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI.

Here is the thing I keep returning to: Apple and OpenAI are still formally partners. The ChatGPT integration in Apple Intelligence, announced at WWDC 2024, has not been unwound. Apple didn't comment on whether the lawsuit affects it. That partnership is presumably worth a considerable amount to both sides in user reach and distribution. Running a trade secret lawsuit in parallel with a product integration deal is an unusual posture. Not unprecedented, but unusual.

The legal outcome will take years. The more immediate question is what this says about OpenAI's hardware ambitions. If Apple's allegations hold up, the picture that emerges is of a company using its recruiting pipeline as an intelligence operation, which is a different kind of capability race from benchmark scores and context windows. Tan allegedly didn't just hire people who knew things. He allegedly taught them how to extract what they knew before they left, and how to not get caught doing it.

Apple's complaint is asking for injunctive relief, monetary damages, and declaratory judgments. But what it really reads like is a company that decided the partnership was worth less than making the other party pay for what it took.