OpenAI rejects Apple's trade secret theft lawsuit claims

A courtroom fight between the two most powerful names in consumer computing was not the story anyone expected out of a partnership that only shipped last year. Apple filed suit on July 10 in a Northern California federal court against OpenAI, its Jony Ive hardware venture io Products, and two former Apple engineers, and OpenAI's public response was a categorical shrug. In a post on X flagged by 9to5Mac, OpenAI's Director of Strategic Communications Drew Pusateri wrote that the company has "no interest in other companies' trade secrets" and remains "focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere."

The complaint tells a more textured story than the denial. Apple names Tang Tan, its former vice president who is now OpenAI's chief hardware officer, and Chang Liu, described as a former senior systems electrical engineer who spent eight years at Apple. According to Apple's filing, Tan directed job candidates coming from Apple to bring "actual parts" to their interviews for "show and tell" sessions, and Liu failed to return an Apple-issued laptop after leaving for OpenAI in 2026, allegedly using it to download confidential technical documents. The suit also accuses the defendants of contacting Apple suppliers using proprietary information.

The strategic backdrop is what makes this awkward. Apple and OpenAI struck their high-profile ChatGPT-in-iOS partnership in 2024, and the same io Products venture is already tangled in a separate suit from hardware startup iyO, which amended its complaint in March 2026 to add trade secret allegations that also named Tan. Two overlapping cases pointing at the same hardware team is not a pattern anyone at OpenAI wants to litigate in parallel.

The honest caveat is that a complaint is only one side, and OpenAI has answered with a blanket denial rather than a fact-by-fact rebuttal, which is normal at this stage. What the reporting does not give you yet is which specific unreleased Apple products the allegedly downloaded documents describe, whether OpenAI's own counsel had reviewed the recruiting practices Apple portrays, or how any of this reshapes the commercial ChatGPT relationship still baked into iOS.

The quiet beneficiaries of a drawn-out fight, if there is one, are the AI hardware plays outside this pairing. Every quarter OpenAI's device team spends in discovery is a quarter of runway for competitors on the same on-device form factors, and a signal to every hardware recruiter that the interview show-and-tell needs to go.