Apple hits ~40 OpenAI staff with evidence-preservation letters in trade-secret fight

Apple has sent legal preservation letters to roughly 40 former employees who have since moved to OpenAI, ordering them to retain any documents, emails, files, and communications that could become evidence. The letters are not lawsuits but a signal that Apple believes the alleged leakage of confidential information reaches well beyond the handful of people named in the complaint it filed a week earlier.

That underlying suit accuses OpenAI of running a coordinated effort to extract Apple’s hardware and product-development secrets by recruiting key engineers, including former executives Tang Tan and Chang Liu. Apple’s more striking claims include an allegation that Tan told Apple staff interviewing at OpenAI to bring ‘actual parts’ for ‘show and tell’ sessions, that OpenAI coached departing employees on how to sidestep Apple’s exit-security processes, and that Liu walked off with an Apple laptop. OpenAI has rejected the allegations, saying it sees no evidence the complaint has merit.

The move widens what is becoming a serious legal confrontation between two of the industry’s biggest players as OpenAI pushes into consumer hardware — territory that puts it in direct competition with Apple. Preservation letters typically presage expanded litigation or additional defendants, so the recipients, many of them rank-and-file engineers, now face personal legal exposure in a fight between their former and current employers.