Apple sends preservation letters to ~40 ex-staff at OpenAI

Apple's lawyers have reportedly sent preservation letters to around 40 of its former employees who now work at OpenAI, telling them to hold on to documents and communications tied to their time at Apple and their transition out of it. The move, first reported by the Financial Times, lands about a week after Apple filed its trade-secret suit against OpenAI, io Products, and two named former Apple engineers, Chang Liu and Tang Tan.

The scale is the interesting part. Apple's own complaint says more than 400 former Apple staff now work at OpenAI, and the 40 letters go to people who are not personally named as defendants. In practice that puts each of them under an individual documentation obligation before discovery formally begins, which fixes evidence in place and creates a legal-hold tax on whatever hardware work OpenAI is doing right now.

Why this matters for the wider industry: the flow of hardware talent from Cupertino to OpenAI has been one of the more visible moves in AI hiring, and Apple's claim is that OpenAI's hiring process itself was the vector for the alleged theft, with candidates asked to bring hardware components and prototypes to interviews. Whether or not those specifics survive contact with a courtroom, other product companies watching this will note the tactic. Preservation letters to non-defendant ex-employees are a way to widen the evidence net without widening the caption of the suit.

The honest caveat is that the reporting is single-sourced through the FT, and secondary outlets like 9to5Mac have picked it up without adding independent detail. We do not have the exact date the letters went out, whether recipients are being asked to sit for interviews as well as preserve records, or how the court has handled Apple's injunction request. OpenAI has said it is not aware of any evidence that the complaint has merit.

Take the specifics as reported, not settled. The forward-looking read is that if you are a hardware engineer considering an OpenAI offer today, the legal weather around that job change just got heavier, and that alone is probably part of what Apple wanted out of this move.