Apple sues OpenAI, claiming its employees stole trade secrets

Apple sued OpenAI, accusing the company of stealing its trade secrets.

In a complaint filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Apple claims it “discovered a pattern of theft of Apple trade secrets by OpenAI employees who previously worked at Apple.”

Along with OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, Apple named two people in the suit: OpenAI hardware director Tang Tan, who worked at Apple for 24 years, and software engineer Chang Liu, who worked at the company for 8 years before joining OpenAI.

“At Apple, our teams are constantly developing groundbreaking technologies to create the world’s best products and services, and protecting their work and intellectual property is something we take very seriously,” an Apple spokesperson said in a statement. “Recently, significant evidence has emerged suggesting that individuals employed by OpenAI improperly took Apple’s secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes, and products. We will always defend the hard work and innovations of our teams, and we are taking all appropriate steps to do so.”

Tech companies have been poaching top tech talent during a rapid billion-dollar hiring spree in recent years as they race to develop advanced AI. But this is the first major lawsuit alleging that some of these job-changing employees are illegally sharing their former employers’ secrets with their new bosses.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, filed a lawsuit in 2025 against OpenAI, alleging that it violated Ziff Davis’ copyrights in the training and operation of its AI systems.)

OpenAI would have sought to move forward in one’s material ambitionswith products like AI headphones and a smartphone. The move could provide OpenAI with a significant revenue stream beyond its subscription levels, especially as it burns through investors’ money. It also has a partnership with Apple which involves integration ChatGPT in Siri to respond to more complex queries; It is unclear what will happen to this collaboration after the trial.

Former Apple design chief Jony Ive’s company io Products merged with OpenAI in 2025. Ive is not mentioned by name in the filing, although Apple highlights articles about OpenAI’s hardware goals and Ive’s involvement.

OpenAI is no stranger to lawsuits. Publishers accused the company of scrape copyrighted works to train large language models like ChatGPT. They also allege OpenAI withholds evidence on how it trains its AI models. The safety of its products has also been questioned. In one of several similar lawsuits, a mother sued OpenAI earlier this year, alleging interactions with her chatbot. led to the death of his daughter.

This growing scrutiny comes as OpenAI plans to become a publicly traded company. It’s not yet clear when that might happen, but Apple’s lawsuit could complicate those efforts, especially if it undermines OpenAI’s hardware goals.

The “tip of the iceberg”

In its filing, Apple said it “entrusted Mr. Tan with its most sensitive projects, relationships with trusted partners, proprietary manufacturing techniques and first-of-its-kind products” during his tenure as vice president of product design for iPhone and Apple Watch.

“Apple’s investigation revealed that Mr. Tan methodically used Apple’s confidential information to benefit OpenAI,” Apple said.

This involved emailing information about Apple suppliers to each other before Tan left the company, according to the filing. He reportedly interviewed OpenAI candidates currently working at Apple on unannounced products in interviews, using the project’s codenames. Apple also alleges that Tan told “candidates still working for Apple to bring ‘real pieces’ from Apple to their interviews for ‘show and tell’ sessions during which he and his team at OpenAI can obtain even more confidential information about Apple.”

In the complaint, Apple alleges that Liu, who worked at Apple as a senior systems electrical engineer, failed to return a work laptop provided by Apple. He then allegedly accessed Apple’s shared network folders and “surreptitiously accessed and downloaded dozens of confidential files related to Apple hardware, including voluminous and detailed information on unreleased products, technical presentations, technical specifications, and proprietary project data.”

Apple called these instances “the tip of the iceberg” in the complaint, noting that there is a “lack of visibility into what is happening behind closed doors at OpenAI, where such misconduct is normalized and exemplified by leadership.” He alleged that OpenAI’s “nascent hardware business now rests on the flimsiest of foundations, rotten to the core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets.”

“We are not interested in the trade secrets of other companies,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement. “We remain focused on creating innovative technologies that empower people everywhere.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s leadership style has already been called into question, leading the company’s 2023 board to fire him brieflyclaiming he was misleading board members and investors. He was quickly reinstated to his position after employee backlash.

In February, when Apple’s investigation had just begun, the company said it wrote to OpenAI, expressing concerns about inappropriate access to Apple’s confidential information. He asked OpenAI about the precautions it was taking to avoid the issue and asked the company to investigate and correct the situation. Apple says OpenAI never responded.

The goal of the lawsuit is to stop OpenAI’s alleged theft of trade secrets, Apple notes.

Apple has expanded its AI partnerships, leveraging Google’s Gemini models to contribute to this year’s Apple Intelligence and Siri updates. Meanwhile, reports suggest that OpenAI may be considering legal action against Apple, alleging that ChatGPT should have been more deeply integrated into Siri and other apps.