Features

Apple sues OpenAI over hardware trade secrets, naming chief hardware officer Tang Tan

The 41-page federal complaint accuses OpenAI, io Products, and two former Apple employees of a coordinated theft campaign — adding a new legal cloud over OpenAI's IPO run-up.

By Markus Voskuhl · Features & longform · 2026-07-21 · 3 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Medhat Dawoud — Apple logo on the exterior of an Apple Store

Apple filed a 41-page federal complaint against OpenAI on July 10 in the Northern District of California, alleging a coordinated trade-secrets scheme that ran, in the company’s words, “at every level, from members of its Technical Staff to its Chief Hardware Officer, and in coordination with business partners.” The named defendants read like a map of OpenAI’s hardware ambitions: the company itself, its io Products subsidiary, chief hardware officer Tang Tan, and former Apple engineer Chang Liu.

Tang, a 24-year Apple veteran and the former VP of product design for iPhone and Apple Watch, is accused of running Apple project codenames past OpenAI recruits, asking job candidates to bring hardware components to “show and tell” interview sessions, and coaching departing employees on how to slip past Apple security. Liu, an eight-year senior systems electrical engineer, allegedly kept his Apple-issued laptop after leaving, used an authentication bug to re-enter Apple’s internal network, and pulled dozens of confidential hardware files.

The scale is what turns this from a personnel dispute into a structural claim. Apple’s complaint notes that more than 400 of its former employees now work at OpenAI. io Products, the hardware startup OpenAI acquired last year for a reported $6.4 to $6.5 billion, is co-founded by Jony Ive, who’s not named as a defendant. Bloomberg reported earlier this week that the group is building a screen-free “humanlike AI companion” for the home.

OpenAI told Fortune it has “no interest in other companies’ trade secrets.”

The timeline reads like a slow decoupling. In 2024, Sam Altman stood at Apple headquarters to announce ChatGPT’s embed into iOS. This January, Apple pivoted its Apple Intelligence refresh to Google’s Gemini. In February, according to the complaint, Apple wrote to OpenAI raising concerns about the alleged poaching operation and never got a reply. Five months later, it sued.

The subtext is IPO timing. A preliminary injunction against OpenAI’s hardware operation would land squarely inside the pre-listing window, and Apple’s lawyers know it. This is what corporate divorce looks like when one side is preparing to go public and the other still owns the trade secrets.

Sources