Stolen laptops, data breaches, secret moles, and recruiting-as-espionage. Here are the wildest claims in Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI

The 41-page lawsuit Apple filed against OpenAI for allegedly stealing trade secrets is a good read. Unless you’re OpenAI, that is. The suit alleges nothing short of a wide-scale corporate espionage campaign carried out by ex-Apple employees who joined OpenAI, according to the filing.

The case centers on two lesser-known OpenAI employees: Tang Yew Tan and Chang Liu. Apple alleges Tan and Liu engaged in “a pattern of theft” of its trade secrets, which are some of the “most valuable intellectual assets in all of American business.” Apple is suing them for two things: “Breach of Intellectual Property Agreement” and “Misappropriation of Trade Secrets in Violation of the Defend Trade Secrets Act.”

The most famous ex-Apple employee now at OpenAI, Jony Ive, is not named in the case, though his involvement is implied as the co-founder of io, an AI hardware startup OpenAI purchased in 2025 and that Apple is now suing as part of the case. Apple is also suing OpenAI as a whole.

OpenAI tells Fortune it has “no interest in other companies’ trade secrets,” and that it is still reviewing the lawsuit, so we don’t yet have its side of the story. “We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere,” OpenAI said.

OpenAI is working on an AI-powered device, about which the company has said almost nothing—besides CEO Sam Altman calling an early prototype “the coolest piece that the world will have ever seen,” in May 2025. Over a year later, the company has still not released concrete details, but the device will most likely compete with smartphones as the primary platform through which consumers access AI on-the-go, whether that’s through smart glasses, AI pins, or something else.

Apple partnered with OpenAI in late 2024 to offer ChatGPT within a revamped version of its Siri voice assistant, a capability which still exists today. Apple was struggling to quickly deploy its own high-caliber AI models at the time, so it leaned on OpenAI’s. But the partnership has gone downhill since then, most notably when Apple chose Google Gemini as its go-forward AI partner in........

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