Apple sues OpenAI, alleging ex-staff funneled trade secrets into its hardware push

Apple has filed suit in the Northern District of California against OpenAI, its hardware unit io Products, and former Apple employees Tang Tan and Chang Liu, claiming they misappropriated confidential information to bolster OpenAI’s nascent consumer-device business. Tan, once VP of product design leading iPhone and Apple Watch work, allegedly used internal project codenames to interrogate job candidates about unreleased products and instructed interviewees still employed at Apple to bring actual hardware parts, CAD files, and prototypes to ‘show and tell’ sessions. Apple also says Liu exploited a security bug to pull over a thousand pages of manufacturing and circuit-board documentation after leaving, joked about the exploit in messages rather than reporting it, and coached a recruit on which confidential materials to review before her OpenAI interview.

The complaint frames these as part of a broader pattern: departing employees allegedly evading Apple’s exit-security protocols, aided by a leaked internal ‘Need to Know’ document detailing those very procedures. Apple further alleges OpenAI misled a trusted Apple supplier into applying a proprietary metal-finishing technique and pressed a battery-and-power vendor with insider terminology. Apple says it flagged concerns to OpenAI back in February and got no response, and calls the filed conduct ‘the tip of the iceberg,’ pointing to more than 400 ex-Apple staff now at OpenAI. Notably, Jony Ive, Evans Hankey, and Scott Cannon — the ex-Apple designers behind io — are named as involved but not personally sued in this initial filing.

The stakes go beyond one lawsuit. It lands as OpenAI races to ship its first hardware device under Ive’s direction, following the $6.5 billion io acquisition, and just after reports that OpenAI was itself weighing legal action against Apple over the stalled ChatGPT-in-Siri partnership (which Apple says is not at issue here). Apple is seeking injunctive relief and damages — a signal it intends to slow, not just penalize, a rival’s hardware ambitions built substantially on Apple-trained talent.