Apple Sues OpenAI Over Alleged Hardware Secret Theft

Key points

• Apple filed a lawsuit in a US federal court in San Jose against OpenAI and its chief hardware officer Tang Tan on 10 July 2026.
• OpenAI paid $6.5 billion in 2025 to acquire io Products, a hardware startup co-founded by Tan and other former senior Apple executives.
• The lawsuit states OpenAI has hired more than 400 former Apple employees.
• Electrical engineer Chang Liu allegedly downloaded dozens of confidential Apple hardware files before leaving the company in January 2026.
• Apple is seeking a court order to stop the alleged theft, financial damages and the return of any stolen property.

Apple doesn't often go to court. When it does, it tends to mean something.

On Friday the company sued OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, and Tang Tan, OpenAI's chief hardware officer, alleging a coordinated campaign to steal its most sensitive engineering secrets. The case was filed in a US district court in San Jose, California.

Tan spent 24 years at Apple overseeing iPhone product design before leaving. He allegedly coached people considering a move to OpenAI on how to slip past Apple's data-security checks, and asked job candidates to bring physical Apple components, batteries, logic boards and metal shields, to interviews for what he called "show and tell" sessions. One employee was caught taking screenshots and downloading files about a secret Apple project in the hours before an interview with Tan. He's also accused of taking an internal Apple document on security procedures for departing workers and using it to help recruits avoid exit processes.

Also named is Chang Liu, an electrical engineer who left Apple in January 2026. Apple discovered the problem after Liu never returned his company laptop and apparently still had access to Apple's internal file-sharing system through a software bug that has since been fixed. Liu allegedly downloaded dozens of confidential hardware files and coached a colleague he was recruiting on how to copy files without alerting Apple's security team.

"OpenAI's nascent hardware business now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets," Apple wrote in the filing.

OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri pushed back: "We have no interest in other companies' trade secrets. We remain focused on building technology that serves people everywhere."

The timing matters. OpenAI paid $6.5 billion in 2025 to buy io Products, a hardware startup co-founded by Tan, Jony Ive and other Apple alumni. AI2Day has followed Tang Tan's moves since our first story on his departure on 13 July 2026. No OpenAI devices are expected to ship before April 2027, and the io brand is reportedly being dropped.

What does this mean for people who own Apple or OpenAI products?

For now, nothing changes on either side. The lawsuit targets how OpenAI built its hardware team, not products people already use. Apple and OpenAI struck a partnership in 2024 to put ChatGPT on iPhones and Macs, but that relationship has cooled, with Apple leaning more on Google's Gemini for its own built-in AI features. The two companies are now set to compete directly in AI-powered consumer devices, which makes this lawsuit about more than trade secrets: it's a preview of how ugly that fight could get.

This case echoes Silicon Valley's last big trade-secret war. In 2017, Waymo sued Uber after a departing engineer allegedly left with thousands of confidential files. Uber settled for $245 million, mid-trial, in 2018.

Apple wrote to OpenAI in February raising concerns and received no reply. That silence ended here.