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.
• OpenAI has hired more than 400 former Apple employees, according to the lawsuit.
• One defendant, 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, plus financial damages and the return of any stolen property.

Apple does not often go to court. When it does, it tends to mean something.

On Friday, the company filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and Tang Tan, OpenAI's chief hardware officer, alleging a coordinated campaign to steal Apple's 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. According to the lawsuit, he allegedly coached people who were considering joining OpenAI on how to slip past Apple's data-security checks, and asked job candidates to bring physical Apple components, such as batteries, logic boards and metal shields, to their 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.

Also named in the lawsuit is Chang Liu, an electrical engineer who left Apple in January 2026. Apple says it discovered the problem early this year when 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 innovative technology that empowers people everywhere."

The timing matters. OpenAI paid $6.5 billion last year to buy io Products, a hardware startup co-founded by Tan alongside former Apple design legend Jony Ive and other Apple alumni. OpenAI has said it is developing a family of AI-powered consumer gadgets, including what is reportedly a voice-controlled puck that sits on a tabletop, though no products are expected to ship before April 2027.

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

For now, nothing changes for consumers on either side. The lawsuit targets how OpenAI built its hardware team, not the products people already use. Apple and OpenAI reached a partnership deal in 2024 to put ChatGPT on iPhones and Macs, but that relationship has cooled, with Apple leaning more on Google's Gemini AI system for its own built-in AI features.

This case echoes one of Silicon Valley's most famous trade-secret battles. In 2017, self-driving car company Waymo sued Uber after a departing engineer allegedly walked out with thousands of confidential files. Uber settled for $245 million the following year, mid-trial.

Apple says it wrote to OpenAI in February raising concerns and received no reply. That silence, it seems, ended in a lawsuit.