Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on Friday alleging the artificial intelligence firm stole company trade secrets in a move to create its own hardware device.
The suit claims OpenAI poached Apple employees, coaxing them to hand over confidential material, product designs and other tightly held information.
“Recently, significant evidence has emerged suggesting individuals employed by OpenAI wrongfully took Apple’s secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes, and products,” an Apple spokesperson said in an email.
Drew Pusateri, a spokesperson for OpenAI, said the company was reviewing the court filing. “We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets,” he added. “We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.”
Apple’s lawsuit is a sharp turnaround for the two tech giants, which announced a major partnership in 2024. That deal involved Apple integrating OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, into the operating systems for iPhones, iPads and Macs. But when Apple showcased its revamped voice assistant Siri last month, its AI component was based on Google’s Gemini AI model, rather than ChatGPT.
Tensions between the two companies began to simmer last year when OpenAI spent $6.4bn to acquire a hardware startup founded by former Apple design guru Jony Ive, indicating that the AI titan was foraying into hardware. Ive’s startup, io Products, is also named in Apple’s lawsuit.
“OpenAI’s nascent hardware business now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets,” Apple wrote in its complaint.
The suit alleges several former Apple employees joined OpenAI, taking company trade secrets with them. Tang Yew Tan, OpenAI’s chief hardware officer and a former vice-president at Apple, is named in the suit. Apple alleges that Tan took information about Apple suppliers with him to OpenAI and encouraged interviewees at OpenAI to divulge confidential company information.
“He has directed job candidates still working for Apple to bring ‘actual parts’ from Apple to their interviews for ‘show and tell’ sessions in which he and his team at OpenAI can elicit still more Apple confidential information,” reads Apple’s complaint.
Chang Liu, another former Apple employee named in the suit who was hired at OpenAI, is accused of taking an Apple laptop with him when he left. Apple alleges that Liu used an authentication bug to breach the company’s internal network and downloaded “dozens of Apple’s confidential hardware-related files”.
The Apple spokesperson said: “Our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies to create the best products and services in the world, and protecting their work and intellectual property is something we take very seriously.”
The company is seeking damages and a court order that would block OpenAI from possessing or using its trade secrets.
