Apple Sues OpenAI Over Trade Secret Theft Claims

Apple filed suit against OpenAI on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accusing the company of stealing trade secrets and breaching contracts through a coordinated recruiting scheme aimed at Apple's hardware division. At the center of the complaint is Tang Tan, OpenAI's Chief Hardware Officer, who spent 24 years at Apple before leaving his post as VP of product design for the iPhone and Apple Watch. Apple claims Tan used the company's internal project code names while courting job candidates, told recruits to bring Apple hardware components to interviews, and coached departing employees on how to dodge Apple's security checks.

The filing lands as OpenAI works on its first hardware product, widely expected to challenge the iPhone directly. Ming-Chi Kuo floated in April that the device could be a smartphone built around AI agents rather than traditional apps, a shift that would cut against the app-store model Apple has run for nearly two decades. OpenAI's hardware push got a major boost last year when it bought io, the startup founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive, for $6.5 billion. Io appears in Apple's complaint, though Ive himself is not named as a defendant.