Apple Sues OpenAI Over Trade Secrets
Sarah Perez (PDF, Hacker News, MacRumors):
The iPhone maker alleges that this misconduct, which it says reveals a pattern of theft from OpenAI employees who previously worked at Apple, was directed by OpenAI’s senior leadership, including Chief Hardware Officer Tang Tan.
The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accuses Tan of using Apple’s confidential project code names during OpenAI’s recruiting process, asking job candidates to bring in Apple hardware components to their interviews, coaching departing Apple employees on how to evade the company’s security procedures, and asking for details about the company’s unannounced products.
Apple’s allegations are detailed and shocking, and it sounds like they have a lot of evidence.
The lawsuit names Chang Liu and Tang Tan as two of the defendants. Tang Tan served as VP of product design at Apple, leading iPhone and Apple Watch product design. He departed the company in February 2024 to work with Jony Ive. Chang Liu, meanwhile, worked at Apple for eight years and was a senior system electrical engineer before departing to join OpenAI in January 2026.
Apple’s lawsuit also names OpenAI and io Products as defendants.
OpenAI’s hardware efforts are being led by Jony Ive, Apple’s former chief design officer.
[…]
Ive, Hankey, and Cannon are not personally mentioned anywhere in Apple’s initial filing today.
Here are the most surprising claims in Apple’s 41-page filing.
OpenAI’s Director of Strategic Communications, Drew Pusateri, took to X to comment on the company’s behalf.
In his post, he claims OpenAI has “no interest in other companies’ trade secrets,” adding that OpenAI remains “focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.”
This seems like a weak response, given that Apple says it reported its findings to OpenAI in February and never heard back. Presumably, they’ve already investigated but see the situation as serious enough that they need to say as little as possible.
It’s not clear to me the extent to which Apple believes the behavior was limited to the named defendants. It’s hard to believe that the rest of OpenAI’s leadership—including Altman and Ive—were unaware, given the scale of their recruiting from Apple. It’s equally hard to believe that they were aware and thought they could get away with it. I guess little from Altman would surprise me at this point. I’d like to believe that Ive wasn’t part of it, but then are we to believe that his former coworkers all kept him in the dark?
What is immediately notable about this whole thing is the myriad conflicts of interest. Apple, of course, has a current partnership with OpenAI to power Apple Intelligence features, something repeatedly mentioned on the previous version of its marketing webpage, and conspicuously absent on the current one.
But the history runs far deeper. Among the defendants in the suit is io Products — do not blame me for that capitalization choice — founded by Jony Ive and acquired by OpenAI last May. Total mentions of “Ive” in the body of this lawsuit? Zero. Also, one of the investors in Ive’s company was Emerson Collective, founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, and which now has equity in OpenAI. Neither Emerson nor Powell Jobs are defendants.
It all reads a bit as if Apple has been building up evidence of these allegations for some time and recently got their smoking gun. It’s not just nebulous “trade secrets” either, there are specific mentions down to “metal finishing techniques” that Apple apparently invented and protected.
It also comes a little less than a month after OpenAI was rumored to be threatening Apple with a lawsuit over the perceived failure of their deal to bake ChatGPT into the iPhone. As I wrote at the time, even just that threat was clearly not going to go over well in Cupertino.
Footnote 13 on p. 15 states:
Apple and OpenAI have a commercial relationship involving the integration of OpenAI’s ChatGPT into Apple Intelligence. The companies have entered into a written agreement governing that integration. That agreement is not at issue here. OpenAI’s acts of trade secret misappropriation alleged herein do not arise from and have no connection to that agreement.
Be that as it may legally speaking, in practical terms it seems untenable for that Apple Intelligence partnership to continue after this.
All that bubbling-under-the-surface tension between Apple and OpenAI is now out in the open!
Namely, while Apple frames OpenAI – or at least its fledgling hardware division – as “rotten to its core” (interesting terminology!), they really only have a case against two and maybe three individuals. But they also clearly believe that if this case goes to trial, they will have a case against a lot more.
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The parallels to the Anthony Levandowski situation after he left Google for Uber have been drawn.
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It is interesting that Apple is not suing Yu-Ting “Alyssa” Peng, who is named in the suit as a co-conspirator with Liu while she was still employed at Apple, before she also subsequently went to work at OpenAI. Is it possible she’s cooperating or has cooperated with Apple in this investigation?
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Even if these allegations are found to be untrue or embellished, can he reasonably stay at OpenAI now? And perhaps that’s the real outcome Apple is looking for here, as they clearly frame him as the ringleader of the 400-plus people who have come over to OpenAI from Apple.
OpenAI’s ambitions to build a hardware rival to the iPhone are already running into trouble because of Apple’s trade secret lawsuit, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who argues the damage is showing up well before any court ruling.
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The scale of the talent drain is a major part of why this matters to Apple. More than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI, including former Apple design chief Jony Ive, and Gurman says the company poached so heavily from Apple's iPhone product design group specifically that Apple had to rebuild parts of the team. Apple has responded with bigger retention bonuses and executives personally working to keep engineers from leaving.
OpenAI stole stuff? I can’t believe it! I thought they were done with stealing after they stole literally everything on the internet.
I’m sure there’s no problem with sending this company all your source code they pinky swear not to train on.
I can’t believe this awful company solicited confidential information and stolen trade secrets, hiring from this other company while pretending to partner with them. ‘Rotten to the core’ indeed
😛
He’s referencing Apple doing this to Masimo. And, of course, Steve Jobs himself directed Apple to engage in illegal hiring practices.
Previously:
- OpenAI Acquires Jony Ive’s io
- Apple v. Optis Cellular Technology
- OpenAI to Become For-Profit Company
- OpenAI and Ive
- Masimo v. Apple
- OpenAI Is Today Unrecognizable
- Inside Apple’s Design Team
- Apple Suing Former A-series Chip Lead
- Apple/Google Hiring Lawsuit, Settled
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Pretty much everybody who has worked with Altman in the past seems to think that he's a pathological liar and a sociopath.
Having said that, I find the breathless reporting hilarious. It's difficult for me to feel any sympathy for Apple here, or even particularly care about this story. From a human perspective, this is an absolutely victimless crime. Oh no, OpenAI knows about some "metal finishing technique", the horror. I shall endeavor to have nightmares about it the very next night, if not sooner.
Meanwhile, the real world.
So far I didn't see any mention of OpenAI supposedly illegally acquiring IP from recent Apple software or UI designs like Liquid Glass.
