Apple sues OpenAI over alleged trade secret theft by ex-employees

Apple's lawsuit against OpenAI, filed in Northern California federal court, centers on allegations that three former Apple employees brought valuable trade secrets to OpenAI after the company acquired Jony Ive's hardware startup io. The complaint, spanning 41 pages, identifies Tang Tan, who spent 24 years as VP of Apple Watch before becoming chief hardware officer at OpenAI, as a central figure. The lawsuit alleges that Tan requested job candidates to bring Apple hardware outside the office for "show and tell" sessions during OpenAI interviews and coached Apple employees about how to circumvent the company's offboarding security procedures. Two other employees named were Chang Liu, a former systems electrical engineer for iPhone who had spent eight years at Apple, and Yu-Ting "Alyssa" Peng, another former Apple staffer whose tenure details remain unclear.

Apple's complaint argues that its "product development, manufacturing, supply chain, technology research, and other innovations" are kept confidential and that "the trade secrets spanning Apple's hardware operations collectively constitute one of the most valuable intellectual assets in all of American business." Critically, Apple implied the lawsuit addresses only a fraction of the problem, stating it had "uncovered a pattern of theft of Apple's trade secrets by OpenAI employees who were formerly at Apple" and declaring "this is the tip of the iceberg … At every level, from members of its Technical Staff to its Chief Hardware Officer, and in coordination with business partners, OpenAI has been stealing Apple's trade secrets and confidential information."

The timing of the lawsuit is particularly damaging for OpenAI, which confidentially filed a Form S-1 with the SEC last month in preparation for going public. The company is also under investor pressure to become profitable and has publicly cut "side quests" to focus on key revenue drivers like enterprise and coding. Most significantly, OpenAI is preparing to launch a hardware device in 2027 after spending nearly $6.5 billion（約1兆円） to acquire Jony Ive's io startup — a bet that OpenAI's hardware ambitions depend on. As Charlyn Ho, CEO of Rikka Law Group, observed, OpenAI appears to be shifting toward hardware because "just the pure software play is not profitable" and because "the next frontier is going to be AI hardware, more than just chips … Robotics and other types of physical AI is the next area that is ripe for disruption."

Legal experts agree the case will be protracted and costly. Avery Williams, cochair of the trade secret practice area at McKool Smith, told The Verge that while the allegations themselves are not unusual for Silicon Valley, "Apple is a tenacious litigant … They do not tend to back down." Williams noted that OpenAI's broader legal exposure is far from resolved: "They've gotten sued a lot. [But] OpenAI is not going to be out of the woods until we get a ruling from a higher court on the fair use question for AI training. It's a trillion-dollar question." Alex Terepka, a founding partner of Watstein Terepka LLP, predicted the case would stretch over years: "Apple and OpenAI are going to be in this for the long haul … You're going to get into discovery, which in these types of cases can be super involved." OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.

OpenAI's legal troubles have multiplied throughout the year, but Apple's lawsuit represents a particularly high-stakes challenge because it targets the company's hardware ambitions at a critical moment. OpenAI has confidentially filed a Form S-1 with the SEC for a public offering and is under investor pressure to turn a profit. The hardware initiative, funded by OpenAI's nearly $6.5 billion（約1兆円） acquisition of Jony Ive's startup io, is central to the company's strategy to diversify beyond software — an area where it allegedly struggles relative to Apple's decades of expertise. The lawsuit directly threatens this path: Apple is known as a determined and stubborn litigant, and experts expect the case to stretch over years through discovery and potential appeals.

The broader context reveals that trade secret lawsuits are rampant in the AI industry, with Scale AI, xAI, and Tesla all pursuing similar cases against competitors or employees who left for rivals. What makes Apple's lawsuit noteworthy to legal observers is not the novelty of the allegations themselves — hiring-stage extraction, interview solicitation, and internal collusion are, as one cybersecurity researcher noted, "run-of-the-mill in terms of insider threats" — but rather that a major company like Apple is pursuing all of them together against another major player. The irony is not lost on legal experts that an AI industry built on consuming vast amounts of data aggressively polices when that information moves between companies. Still, the industry has historical precedent: pre-generative AI tech spent decades in similar disputes, from Google's book-scanning project to YouTube's early piracy enablement.