Apple filed suit against OpenAI on Friday, July 10, 2026, alleging trade secret theft by former Apple employees now working at the ChatGPT maker. The complaint, lodged in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, names OpenAI's hardware subsidiary IO Products alongside two individual defendants: Tang Tan, OpenAI's chief hardware officer, and Chang Liu, who joined OpenAI from Apple in January The Verge.

IO Products is the entity OpenAI formed after acquiring Jony Ive's hardware startup in 2025, the effort widely understood to be building OpenAI's first consumer hardware device. Both Tan and Liu previously held senior hardware roles at Apple before departing for that effort.

The complaint's specific allegations are granular. According to Apple, Chang Liu accessed Apple's internal systems after his departure and downloaded dozens of confidential hardware-related files — engineering presentations, technical specifications, and proprietary project data among them The Verge. The filing further alleges Liu coached a former Apple colleague on how to copy confidential files while evading detection by Apple's internal security team, according to the complaint itself.

Tan faces parallel allegations. Apple's complaint states he emailed information about Apple suppliers to himself prior to leaving the company, and that he solicited confidential Apple information from Apple employees during OpenAI job interviews. More broadly, the suit alleges OpenAI instructed prospective hires still employed at Apple to bring CAD files, design artifacts, and physical prototypes to interviews — conduct Apple's complaint characterizes as part of a "coordinated pattern of misconduct at an institutional level" rather than isolated individual lapses WFMY.

An Apple spokesperson said "significant evidence has emerged suggesting individuals employed by OpenAI wrongfully took Apple's secret and confidential information regarding unreleased technologies, processes, and products" The Verge. OpenAI's response to the specific allegations was not detailed in the filings reviewed for this story.

The institutional-misconduct framing is the sharpest edge of the complaint. Apple is not simply alleging that two employees misbehaved on their way out the door — a fact pattern courts see with some regularity in Silicon Valley talent poaching disputes. It is alleging that soliciting confidential materials from prospective hires was, per the complaint, standard practice at OpenAI's hardware unit, extending to interview instructions to bring CAD data and prototypes. If substantiated, that would shift the case from an employee-conduct dispute toward a corporate-liability one, with materially higher exposure for OpenAI and IO Products.

There is an obvious subtext to where this dispute is happening. Apple has for years guarded its hardware development process — supplier relationships, industrial design pipelines, unreleased product specifications — with a level of internal secrecy that has become something of an industry byword. That OpenAI's push into consumer hardware, via the Ive-founded IO Products, is staffed in part by veterans of that exact process gives Apple's complaint an added charge: the company is effectively alleging that the walls it spent decades building were breached from the inside by people it trained.

Worth flagging: trade secret suits of this kind are notoriously difficult to litigate to a clean verdict. Courts must weigh an employee's baseline knowledge and experience — the tacit expertise a hardware engineer legitimately carries between employers — against specific documents or data alleged to have been misappropriated. Apple's complaint appears to lean heavily on the latter category, citing downloaded files and self-emailed supplier data, which tends to produce more tractable evidence than claims resting purely on institutional knowledge.

The litigation also lands amid intensifying competition between the two companies well beyond hardware. Apple has been integrating third-party large language models into its own software stack while simultaneously building in-house AI capabilities; OpenAI, meanwhile, has been expanding beyond software into physical products under Ive's design leadership. A dispute over trade secrets in that context carries commercial stakes beyond the individual defendants named.

What happens next will likely turn on discovery. Apple's complaint, as filed, points to concrete digital artifacts — file downloads, emails, interview instructions — rather than vague assertions of misused expertise. That evidentiary specificity, if it holds up, gives this case a firmer footing than many trade secret disputes in the technology sector, where the line between an employee's accumulated know-how and an employer's proprietary information is often blurry enough to sink a claim before it reaches trial.