Apple sued OpenAI on Friday in federal court in California, accusing it of stealing trade secrets to build its own devices. The suit names OpenAI and two former Apple employees, and asks the court to block OpenAI from using the technology and to award damages.
Two years ago the two companies were partners. Sam Altman appeared at Apple’s 2024 event when ChatGPT was added to the iPhone. Since then OpenAI has moved into hardware, and the relationship has fallen apart.
The allegations
Apple’s main claims center on two people. Tang Tan ran iPhone and Apple Watch design and left in early 2024 for Jony Ive’s startup. He now leads hardware at OpenAI. Apple says he told job candidates who still worked at Apple to bring real parts to their interviews, used internal codenames to get more out of them, and kept an Apple security document that he used to show new hires how to get past the company’s exit checks. Part of that advice, according to the complaint, was not to tell Apple they were leaving.
The second employee, Chang Liu, worked at Apple as an electrical engineer for eight years and joined OpenAI in January. Apple says he kept his work laptop, found a bug that let him reach Apple’s cloud storage after he left, and downloaded dozens of confidential hardware files. In a message to a former colleague, he said he could still get into the storage and called it funny.
How the partnership fell apart
The two companies have been drifting apart for a year. In 2024, ChatGPT was built into iOS and the deal was treated as a major partnership. Last year OpenAI bought Ive’s hardware company, io Products, for $6.4 billion and started hiring Apple engineers. In May, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was considering its own lawsuit against Apple over the ChatGPT integration. Apple’s new version of Siri, coming this fall, uses Google’s Gemini rather than OpenAI.
What OpenAI is building
OpenAI’s hardware is still unannounced. Reports describe a device that is aware of its surroundings, possibly a smart speaker, built by a team that now includes a number of former Apple engineers. OpenAI said it has no interest in anyone else’s trade secrets and plans to fight the case.
What is at stake
The dispute is partly about where computing goes next. Both companies expect that AI assistants will let people do more without opening apps or looking at a screen, which would make the phone less central and put value in whatever device comes next. Apple built the iPhone into that central device over the past decade. It is now suing a former partner that has hired away its hardware people to build an alternative.
