Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on Friday, accusing the company of stealing trade secrets while developing its own hardware devices.
The complaint alleges that OpenAI poached Apple employees and convinced them to hand over confidential materials, product designs, and other securely held information.
“Significant evidence has recently come to light suggesting that individuals employed by OpenAI improperly removed confidential information about Apple’s unreleased technologies, processes, and products,” an Apple spokesperson said in an email.
OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the company is reviewing the court filing. “We’re not interested in other companies’ trade secrets,” he added. “We remain focused on building innovative technologies that empower people everywhere.”
Apple’s lawsuit marks a watershed moment for the two tech giants, who had previously announced a major partnership in 2024. The deal included Apple integrating ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot, into the iPhone, iPad, and Mac operating systems. But when Apple announced its improved voice assistant Siri last month, its AI component was based on Google’s Gemini AI model rather than ChatGPT.
Tensions between the companies began smoldering last year after OpenAI spent $6.4 billion to acquire a hardware startup founded by former Apple design guru Jony Ive, signaling the AI giant’s expansion into hardware. Ive’s startup, Io Products, is also named in Apple’s lawsuit.
“OpenAI’s nascent hardware business is now built on the most shaky of foundations, rotten to the core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets,” Apple said in its complaint.
The complaint alleges that several former Apple employees took trade secrets with them when they joined OpenAI. Tang Yew Tan, OpenAI’s chief hardware officer and former Apple vice president, is named in the lawsuit. Apple alleges that Tan brought information about Apple’s suppliers to OpenAI and encouraged OpenAI interviewees to divulge confidential company information.
“He instructed job applicants who were still working at Apple to bring ‘real parts’ of Apple to their interviews and conduct ‘show-and-tell’ sessions from which he and his team at OpenAI could extract even more confidential Apple information,” Apple’s complaint states.
Another former Apple employee named in the lawsuit, Zhang Liu, who was employed by OpenAI, is accused of taking an Apple laptop with him when he left the company. Apple claims that Liu used an authentication bug to infiltrate its internal network and download “dozens of sensitive Apple hardware-related files.”
An Apple spokesperson said, “Our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technology to create the world’s best products and services, and we take protecting their work and intellectual property very seriously.”
The company is seeking damages and a court order to prevent OpenAI from possessing or using its trade secrets.
