Analysis
OpenAI responded publicly to Apple's trade secrets lawsuit with a post arguing the case is "careless, aggressive and oddly personal," as covered by Fortune. Apple filed on July 10, alleging that former employees carried confidential information into OpenAI's hardware program, naming Chang Liu, accused of accessing material after his departure, and Tang Tan, accused of seeking and using Apple trade secrets.
OpenAI's rebuttal is procedural as much as substantive. It says Apple's outside counsel emailed the wrong person in February after confusing two similar last names, then told OpenAI the matter was being resolved without raising the allegations that later appeared in the complaint. It published iMessages it says show Apple employees asking Liu to help them find files after he left, and argues Apple fails to revoke system access on departure, leaving ex-employees with credentials they neither want nor know about.
“Apple's suit is best read as an attempt to slow a hardware program staffed substantially by its own alumni, at the moment OpenAI is trying to ship a device.”
The backdrop is a talent flow, not a single hire: more than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI, and Tang Tan was a senior figure in Apple's hardware design organization before joining Jony Ive's io, which OpenAI acquired in 2025. Apple's suit is best read as an attempt to slow a hardware program staffed substantially by its own alumni, at the moment OpenAI is trying to ship a device.
Trade secret cases between large technology companies rarely produce clean verdicts. Waymo versus Uber settled; Zoox versus Tesla settled. What they reliably produce is discovery, which is where OpenAI's hardware timeline and Apple's internal AI decisions both become exposed. Litigating this in public blog posts is unusual and cuts both ways -- the emails OpenAI chose to publish are the ones that help OpenAI.
What to watch: whether Apple amends the complaint to address the February communications directly, and whether the court sets an early schedule that puts OpenAI's device roadmap into discovery before it launches.
