Apple filed a 41-page trade secret complaint against OpenAI and former Apple engineer Chang Liu on Friday, July 10, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The case, docketed as Apple Inc. v. Liu, No. 5:26-cv-07078, asserts claims for trade secret misappropriation and breach of contract, and was filed on Apple's behalf by attorney Gabriel Gross CourtListener. The complaint itself is publicly available on DocumentCloud as document 28453229 TechCrunch.

Chang Liu, a former senior systems electrical engineer at Apple who later joined OpenAI, is named as a defendant alongside the AI company. Apple alleges Liu accessed the company's internal network storage by exploiting an authentication bug, using a work computer issued to another Apple employee, Yu-Ting "Alyssa" Peng. Peng, who Apple alleges served as a conduit between the two companies, also later joined OpenAI but is not named as a defendant in the suit TechCrunch.

The complaint's most striking allegations concern Tang Yew Tan, OpenAI's chief hardware officer, who spent 24 years at Apple, most recently as vice president of product design for iPhone and Apple Watch. Apple alleges Tan directed job candidates who were still Apple employees to bring "actual parts," CAD and design artifacts, and prototypes to their OpenAI interviews. The filing further alleges that OpenAI coached departing Apple staff on how to evade Apple's internal security procedures specifically to avoid detection of the alleged theft TechCrunch.

Reuters reported the filing under the headline "Apple sues OpenAI, two former employees for trade secrets theft," framing the action as touching multiple individuals connected to the alleged scheme Reuters. CNBC's coverage confirmed the Northern District of California venue and the trade secrets framing on the same day the suit became public CNBC.

Neither Apple nor OpenAI has issued a substantive public statement responding to the specific allegations in the complaint beyond confirming the filing itself, and no response from Tan, Liu, or Peng has been reported.

The presence of Tan as a named figure in the allegations is notable given his seniority and tenure. He is not currently listed as a defendant in the docket, which names Liu and OpenAI, but the complaint's narrative places him at the center of alleged recruitment practices involving physical hardware and design materials rather than digital files alone. That distinction matters in trade secret litigation: courts typically scrutinize whether alleged misappropriation involved documented, protected information versus general skills and knowledge an employee is legally entitled to carry between employers. Physical prototypes and CAD artifacts, if the allegations hold up, would sit more clearly on the protected side of that line than an engineer's accumulated expertise.

The authentication bug allegation is also worth flagging on its own terms. If accurate, it describes not a rogue employee copying files before departure, a familiar pattern in trade secret disputes, but an exploited access control weakness used to reach systems the accessing party's job function should not have touched. That framing, if it survives discovery, would push the case toward classic unauthorized access territory alongside the trade secret claims, and could complicate OpenAI's defense regardless of what Liu or Tan intended.

Apple and OpenAI compete only indirectly today, since Apple has largely partnered with rather than built frontier large language models, while OpenAI has expanded into hardware ambitions under Tan's leadership following its acquisition of design talent from the consumer electronics world. This suit surfaces publicly how porous the boundary between the two companies' talent pools has become, and how contentious that porousness can turn once litigation begins. Silicon Valley's engineering and design talent has always circulated between rival firms, and departing employees taking institutional knowledge with them is an old story in this industry. What is less common is a complaint alleging that a hiring company's chief hardware officer actively solicited physical artifacts from a rival's active employees during the interview process itself.

For enterprise legal and HR teams watching AI labs recruit aggressively from established hardware and software incumbents, the case is likely to become a reference point regardless of outcome. It tests how far courts will let plaintiffs go in alleging that a hiring company's recruitment culture, not just an individual employee's conduct, constitutes actionable misappropriation. Discovery in the case, should it proceed past early motions, may surface internal OpenAI communications that clarify whether Tan's alleged instructions were policy, informal practice, or isolated conduct.