Features

Apple sues OpenAI over trade-secret theft, naming hardware chief Tang Tan

The iPhone maker's complaint, filed Friday in the Northern District of California, alleges a coordinated campaign to lift confidential designs — and threatens a ChatGPT partnership already visibly fraying.

By Markus Voskuhl · Features & longform · 2026-07-12 · 3 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Tingey Injury Law Firm — Wooden judge's gavel resting on a dark surface, symbolizing a federal court filing

Apple sued OpenAI in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Friday, alleging a coordinated scheme to extract confidential hardware designs and naming as a defendant Tang Tan, OpenAI’s Chief Hardware Officer and a 24-year Apple veteran who once ran product design for the iPhone and Apple Watch. IO Products, the Jony Ive-founded startup OpenAI acquired for $6.4 billion, is also named. Ive isn’t.

The complaint reads less like a personnel grievance than an indictment of a hiring pipeline. Per TechCrunch, Apple accuses Tan of using internal project code names to entice candidates, asking recruits to bring Apple hardware components to interviews, and coaching departing engineers on how to evade the company’s security procedures. Apple’s language is precise about the vertical scope: the alleged conduct runs “at every level, from members of its Technical Staff to its Chief Hardware Officer.”

Then there’s Chang Liu, a former senior systems electrical engineer who left for OpenAI in January 2026. According to Apple’s complaint as reported by the Washington Post, Liu didn’t respond to attempts to schedule an exit interview, sign the confidentiality reminder, or return his devices. He allegedly kept a company laptop and downloaded dozens of confidential hardware files, including engineering presentations and specifications for unreleased products.

Apple says it wrote to OpenAI in February and got no reply. OpenAI, for its part, says it has “no interest in other companies’ trade secrets.”

The timing does most of the analytical work here. OpenAI is preparing a historic IPO and expects to ship its first consumer device later this year, following Sam Altman’s November statement that the company had finished its first hardware prototypes. Apple, meanwhile, has quietly moved on: the ChatGPT integration launched inside Apple Intelligence in 2024 is being outflanked by an updated Siri, due this fall, built on Google’s Gemini models rather than OpenAI’s.

Reuters called the filing “a dramatic escalation of already simmering tension between the two companies.” That framing understates it. Apple is asserting, on the eve of OpenAI’s IPO roadshow and its first device launch, that the hardware team building that device was staffed through misappropriation. It’s a discovery-calendar problem as much as a legal one, and both sides know how those calendars work.

Sources