Apple sued OpenAI on Friday, accusing the company and OpenAI chief hardware officer Tang Tan of stealing trade secrets for use in the AI company’s efforts to build their own devices.
The lawsuit, filed in the Northern District of California and viewed by TheWrap, alleges Tan and technical staff member Chang Liu stole confidential Apple information.
“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’s trade secrets and confidential information,” Apple said in the legal filing.
The move is a stark contrast to when the two companies partnered in 2024 in a bid for Apple to use ChatGPT to fuel Siri. But Apple’s new Siri is instead powered by Google’s AI.
A battle between Apple and OpenAI has been brewing since OpenAI announced its intention to build its own hardware. It bought former Apple designer Jony Ive’s startup IO Products for $6.4 billion last year. IO Products is also named in the lawsuit.
Apple alleges in the suit that Tan encouraged Apple employees interviewing at OpenAI to share confidential information and to even bring devices to the interviews.
“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,” Apple said in the filing.
Apple said Liu “coached his former Apple colleague (whom he was recruiting to join OpenAI) on ways to ‘avoid trouble with the security team’ when copying confidential Apple files.”
“This is the tip of the iceberg,” the lawsuit alleges. “Apple lacks visibility into what’s been happening behind closed doors at OpenAI, where such misconduct is normalized and exemplified by leadership.”
Apple is seeking damages, injunctions and an order to force OpenAI to stop using its trade secrets.
This lawsuit comes after a large group of nationwide print and digital publishers banded together to sue OpenAI and Microsoft for mass copyright infringement in late June. That suit alleges that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot “systematically and secretly crawled” hundreds of news websites to scrape information used to train their AI programs.
OpenAI is separately in another copyright infringement lawsuit with the New York Times and other publishers.
