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Apple has taken OpenAI to court. On 10 July 2026 it filed a lawsuit in a federal court in Northern California, accusing the ChatGPT company of stealing trade secrets to build its upcoming AI hardware device. The suit charges OpenAI with trade secret theft and breach of contract. It also names two former Apple employees who now work at OpenAI, plus io Products, the hardware startup OpenAI bought last year for close to 6.5 billion dollars.

Apple put ChatGPT inside the iPhone in 2024, and Sam Altman turned up at Apple’s campus for the launch. That warmth is gone. OpenAI decided to build its own hardware, the relationship cooled, and now they are in a courtroom.

What Apple says happened

The company says the alleged theft ran through OpenAI at every level, from ordinary engineers up to the hardware boss. In Apple’s telling, OpenAI was in a rush to ship a device and chose to copy instead of build.

Apple says it got suspicious in early 2026, when it started seeing its own confidential information turn up in OpenAI’s work. It wrote to OpenAI in February to flag the problem. OpenAI never replied. Apple says, is why it kept digging and eventually sued. Two men sit in the middle of the complaint.

Tang Tan, hardware chief

Tang Tan spent more than twenty years at Apple and left in early 2024 as a vice president of product design, after leading design on the iPhone and Apple Watch.

Apple says he used what he knew from the inside to pull secrets out of its own staff. Per the filing, Tan told Apple employees who were interviewing at OpenAI to carry real hardware parts to the interview, things like batteries, logic boards and chip packages, and walk his team through them. He is also accused of dropping Apple’s secret project codenames into interviews to get candidates talking, and of handing new hires an internal Apple document about exit security so they could slip out quietly before resigning. Apple adds that he emailed himself details about its suppliers before he left, then used those contacts to help OpenAI.

Chang Liu, the engineer with the laptop

Chang Liu worked at Apple for about eight years as a senior electrical engineer before joining OpenAI in January 2026. Apple’s sharpest accusation is aimed at him. It says he kept his Apple laptop after quitting, found a bug that let him reach Apple’s internal file storage, and pulled down dozens of confidential hardware files while he was already an OpenAI employee. Instead of reporting the bug, Apple says, he messaged a colleague still at Apple and joked about it, calling it “so funny” that he could still access to network storage remotely after his departure.

Apple also names a current employee it says kept feeding Liu updates on its projects and suppliers. And it claims OpenAI talked one supplier into using an Apple manufacturing method by pretending it had Apple’s permission.

Names Apple left out

Jony Ive, who leads the device work at OpenAI, and Sam Altman are both mentioned, yet neither is a defendant and neither is accused of doing anything wrong. Apple is not going after OpenAI’s hiring either, though it notes that more than 400 of its former staff now work there.

What OpenAI said back

An OpenAI spokesperson said the company has no interest in anyone else’s trade secrets and is focused on building useful technology. OpenAI said it was still reviewing the filing.

What this does to Apple

The company has watched hardware talent walk over to OpenAI, and its own AI year has been rough, with the new Siri delayed again and again and now running on Google’s Gemini instead of OpenAI. Suing in public warns the engineers who stayed, and everyone watching, that leaving with Apple’s work product can land you in court.

OpenAI and Jony Ive have been the ones getting credit for reimagining the personal device. Apple is telling the world that idea was built on Apple’s own work.

What this does to OpenAI

OpenAI is close to showing off a device meant to take people past the smartphone, designed with Ive’s team. Apple wants a court order that would force the defendants to freeze evidence, stop touching any Apple technology, and hand back whatever they took. If a judge agrees to even part of that, OpenAI’s hardware work could stall right when it wants to move fast.

OpenAI is expected to go public in a large listing before long. A trade secret brawl with one of the most valuable companies on earth is not the story you want running while investors decide what you are worth.

What both sides are really after

Most of the industry believes that once AI assistants can handle daily tasks on their own, people will look at their screens less. Apple built itself on the iPhone. OpenAI thinks it can build the thing that comes after it.

Every claim here comes from Apple’s own complaint, written by Apple to win its case. The real signal comes next, when OpenAI files its answer and a judge rules on Apple’s request to freeze things.