Apple Sues OpenAI, Names Hardware Chief in Trade Secret Suit

The lawsuit Apple filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California this week is unusually personal. It names OpenAI's Chief Hardware Officer, Tang Tan, who spent 24 years at Apple as VP of product design for iPhone and Apple Watch, and accuses him of using Apple's confidential project code names during recruiting and coaching departing Apple staff on how to evade Apple's own security procedures on the way out, according to TechCrunch.

The complaint also singles out Chang Liu, a former Apple senior systems electrical engineer who left for OpenAI in 2026 and allegedly kept his Apple-issued laptop, downloaded confidential technical documents onto it, and shared what he took with other Apple employees weighing OpenAI offers. Apple's language in the filing is unusually theatrical for a corporate complaint, calling OpenAI's hardware business "rotten to its core" and describing what it has surfaced so far as "the tip of the iceberg."

The timing is the real story. OpenAI is reportedly developing its first hardware product, thought to be a smartphone that runs AI agents instead of apps, and it paid $6.5 billion in 2025 to acquire Jony Ive's design company io to build it. A trade secret suit landing as that product moves from concept toward silicon is not a coincidence. Apple is trying to slow OpenAI's hardware roadmap at the moment it is most fragile, and it has picked the strongest available lever, not patents or design, but the movement of people and documents.

The honest caveat is that this is Apple's version of the facts, not a court's ruling on them. Talent leaving Apple for another company is not by itself illegal, and the more colorful allegations, including the alleged misuse of a "proprietary metal finishing technique" with a partner company, will need discovery before anyone can judge how strong they really are. What the reporting does not yet tell us is whether OpenAI has responded, which specific unreleased products are covered, or what remedy Apple is actually asking the court to grant.

The people who quietly benefit if this drags on are OpenAI's rivals in AI hardware, because a serious injunction against the device work would hand them daylight at exactly the moment OpenAI planned to have something to show. The people watching most closely are probably OpenAI's own hardware recruits, because a courtroom is now a much less comfortable place for a resume built on Apple project names.