Apple just filed a trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI. But it carefully steered around one very famous target.
The iPhone maker filed the lawsuit on July 10 in US District Court for the Northern District of California. The complaint alleges OpenAI orchestrated a systematic campaign to recruit over 400 former Apple employees, siphoning confidential information, product designs, and manufacturing processes in the process. The name conspicuously absent from the filing: Jony Ive, the legendary designer whose startup io was acquired by OpenAI in May 2025 for roughly $6.4 to $6.5 billion in an all-equity deal.
What Apple is actually alleging
The lawsuit specifically names OpenAI’s chief hardware officer, Tang Tan, accusing him of leading the recruitment effort that pulled hundreds of engineers away from Cupertino. According to the complaint, some departing employees retained Apple laptops and accessed sensitive files after leaving the company.
Apple and OpenAI were partners not long ago. ChatGPT integration into Apple devices was supposed to represent a new era of cooperation between the two tech giants. That partnership now looks like it was a brief intermission in what has become a full-blown corporate rivalry.
