The allegations referenced three former Apple employees: Tang Tan, former VP of Apple Watch, who spent 24 years at Apple before becoming chief hardware officer of OpenAI (after OpenAI bought Jony Ive\u2019s hardware company, io); Chang Liu, former systems electrical engineer for iPhone, who spent eight years at Apple before departing for OpenAI; and Yu-Ting \u201cAlyssa\u201d Peng, another former Apple employee who also left for OpenAI. (Less is known about Peng\u2019s Apple tenure.) The lawsuit makes a lot of wild claims<\/a>, including Tan allegedly requesting prospective employees to bring Apple hardware outside the office for \u201cshow and tell\u201d during their OpenAI interviews and coaching Apple employees about how to avoid the company\u2019s offboarding security procedures. (It\u2019s unclear which, if any, of Apple\u2019s hardware-related trade secrets may have made it into OpenAI\u2019s device, as it does not yet have a publicly shown product.)<\/p>\n Avery Williams, cochair of the trade secret practice area at McKool Smith and author of the firm\u2019s AI Litigation Tracker, told The Verge that he thinks OpenAI\u2019s legal troubles are far from over. \u201cThey\u2019ve gotten sued a lot. [But] OpenAI is not going to be out of the woods until we get a ruling from a higher court on the fair use question for AI training. It\u2019s a trillion-dollar question.\u201d<\/p>\n The lawsuit is yet another obstacle for OpenAI, which has had a rollercoaster six months full of drama with rivals over US military red lines, protests over contract with the US government, a drawn-out legal battle with former OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk, and a race with Anthropic over which frontier lab would be first to IPO \u2014 not to mention a laundry list of lawsuits, a few<\/a> of which<\/a> came from Musk himself. Another still ongoing lawsuit was brought by the family of Adam Raine<\/a>, a 16-year-old who died by suicide after confiding in ChatGPT. And then there\u2019s the long-running suit<\/a> brought by The New York Times and other publishers against OpenAI, alleging copyright infringement.<\/p>\n The timing of Apple\u2019s lawsuit is also far from ideal for OpenAI: The company is gearing up to go public, having confidentially submitted<\/a> a Form S-1 last month with the SEC; it\u2019s facing investor pressure to turn a profit<\/a>; and it\u2019s cut out a bunch of \u201cside quests\u201d<\/a> in order to focus on key revenue drivers like enterprise and coding. Perhaps most significantly, though, it\u2019s getting ready to release a much-hyped hardware device in 2027<\/a>, after paying nearly $6.5 billion<\/a> to buy famed Apple designer Jony Ive\u2019s hardware startup, io (and handling yet another lawsuit<\/a> from a company called Iyo). Apple may have a reputation for falling behind in AI<\/a>, but it\u2019s always had a head start in hardware, and OpenAI has the opposite reputation. A common industry refrain states that \u201chardware is hard\u201d; for evidence, just take a look at the graveyard of erstwhile overhyped AI devices, like the Humane AI pin.<\/p>\n \u201cThe next frontier is going to be AI hardware, more than just chips \u2026 Robotics and other types of physical AI is the next area that is ripe for disruption,\u201d said Charlyn Ho, CEO and founder of Rikka Law Group, a law firm focusing on tech, privacy, and cybersecurity law. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of interesting to see OpenAI \u2026 going into that play, because maybe they\u2019re seeing [that] just the pure software play is not profitable.\u201d She added, \u201cThey\u2019re a frontier lab. They\u2019re spending more money than they\u2019re making at the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n It makes sense that OpenAI would want to hire to fill in those hardware gaps and speed up its hardware progress. But now, it\u2019s led to what will likely be a costly legal battle.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s never fantastic to get sued by Apple when you\u2019re trying to IPO,\u201d said McKool Smith\u2019s Williams. \u201cApple is a tenacious litigant \u2026 They do not tend to back down.\u201d<\/p>\n OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n Over the weekend, one X user wrote<\/a>, \u201cSam Altman wasn\u2019t afraid of Elon but he is terrified of Apple. You can tell by all his posting today.\u201d Altman replied, \u201ci am not afraid of apple, but i have tremendous respect for them. s-tier company.\u201d<\/p>\n Apple and OpenAI have in the past had a relatively positive public relationship; the two in 2024 entered into an agreement to integrate ChatGPT into Apple devices. This lawsuit represents a significant departure. \u201cApple and OpenAI have been on the same side \u2026 As the industry gets more and more competitive, you\u2019re starting to see these alliances fracture,\u201d said Rikka Law Group\u2019s Ho.<\/p>\n In today\u2019s hyper-competitive AI industry, public accusations or lawsuits over trade secrets, corporate espionage, and illicit information harvesting are incredibly common. Point to any AI leader and chances are they\u2019ve got at least one lawsuit or accusation to their name. As far as trade secrets, there\u2019s Scale AI accusing an employee who left for Mercor<\/a>, xAI accusing employees who left for OpenAI<\/a>, and Tesla accusing an employee<\/a> who allegedly transferred data about an AI supercomputer to his personal laptop (and another employee<\/a> related to robotics-related trade secrets). As far as distillation and improper information harvesting, there\u2019s Anthropic\u2019s accusations<\/a> to Chinese AI companies and xAI\u2019s alleged distillation<\/a> of OpenAI\u2019s models.<\/p>\n And although Apple\u2019s lawsuit against OpenAI made headlines, most experts The Verge spoke with said none of the allegations were particularly unusual in and of themselves \u2014 it was more interesting that they all happened in the same case and that they were two large players. Trade secrets lawsuits can also be tough to prove in court, since unlike copyright or trademark lawsuits, you\u2019re not typically directly comparing one thing against another. Haibing Lu, professor of information systems and analytics at Santa Clara University\u2019s Leavey School of Business, said Apple\u2019s allegations are \u201cnot unique\u201d and that \u201cit\u2019s quite common in Silicon Valley.\u201d McKool Smith\u2019s Williams said that the case reads like a \u201crun-of-the-mill trade secrets misappropriations claim.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis isn\u2019t really an AI case as it is a case against an AI company,\u201d Williams continued. \u201cThe players are huge, but the allegations are otherwise not unusual.\u201d<\/p>\n For Michael Barnhart, a nation-state threat researcher at cybersecurity firm DTEX, \u201cthe layered approach\u201d of the allegations made Apple\u2019s lawsuit interesting: hiring-stage extraction, interview-based solicitation, internal collusion. It\u2019s \u201cvery run-of-the-mill in terms of insider threats and this is how they act,\u201d he said. But at the same time, he said, \u201cWe can sit there and I\u2019ll pull up a company that did one of these things badly \u2026 You\u2019ll have one, you\u2019ll have two, you\u2019ll have three \u2014 this one\u2019s got all of them. This one has so many. And also, too, at the highest level.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s somewhat ironic that, in an industry that\u2019s only possible because of the untold amounts of data it\u2019s consumed \u2014 whether technically above-board or unauthorized \u2014 AI labs get particularly litigious when others take that information elsewhere. After all, the AI industry is a small world, and it\u2019s famously cliquish. Anthropic was founded by ex-OpenAI executives, xAI was founded by an ex-OpenAI cofounder, and countless startups have been acquired (or their core talent acqui-hired) by either the workplaces they were born out of or those companies\u2019 chief competitors. Many of the most influential people at every leading AI company once worked extremely closely with their rivals at another, and in the future, many of them probably will again.<\/p>\n But mentioning that type of irony about the AI industry means you have to bear out that same point across recent decades. Yes, Anthropic allegedly scanned millions of copyrighted books to train its AI models, but the pre-generative AI tech industry spent decades entrenched in similar controversies: Google scanning millions of books<\/a> to create a searchable database, for instance, or the sheer amount of piracy YouTube indirectly enabled in the early 2000s.<\/p>\n Apple implied in its legal filing that there were significantly more former employees who left for OpenAI with key information than it named in the lawsuit. The company said it had \u201cuncovered a pattern of theft of Apple\u2019s trade secrets by OpenAI employees who were formerly at Apple\u201d and that \u201cthis is the tip of the iceberg \u2026 At every level, from members of its Technical Staff to its Chief Hardware Officer, and in coordination with business partners, OpenAI has been stealing Apple\u2019s trade secrets and confidential information.\u201d<\/p>\n Alex Terepka, a founding partner of Watstein Terepka LLP, said the case is likely to be contentious and drawn out, potentially over the course of years. \u201cApple and OpenAI are going to be in this for the long haul,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat Apple\u2019s put together here is frankly way more than enough to survive a motion to dismiss. Then you\u2019re going to get into discovery, which in these types of cases can be super involved.\u201d<\/p>\n The software side of the AI industry has generated inestimable hype, competition, and controversy, but hardware is the next area AI companies have their sights set on conquering. But since AI devices haven\u2019t truly been tested yet on a broad scale, it\u2019ll take time to see what success in that space looks like \u2014 especially with a potential yearslong legal battle between Apple and OpenAI ahead.<\/p>\n Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Hayden FieldClose Hayden Field<\/p>\n Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n See All by Hayden Field<\/a><\/p>\n AIClose<\/p>\n AI<\/p>\n Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n See All AI<\/a><\/p>\n AppleClose<\/p>\n Apple<\/p>\n Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n See All Apple<\/a><\/p>\n OpenAIClose<\/p>\n OpenAI<\/p>\n Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n See All OpenAI<\/a><\/p>\n ReportClose<\/p>\n Report<\/p>\n Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n![\"Hayden](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/HAYDEN_BLURPLE.jpg\"\/)
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