Apple escalates its OpenAI trade secrets lawsuit with an injunction request and four depositions.Apple has asked a federal judge to bar OpenAI and two of its own former engineers from touching what it describes as stolen trade secrets, turning a month-old lawsuit into an active fight over evidence. In a motion filed Monday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, Apple sought a preliminary injunction stopping the defendants from accessing, acquiring, using or disclosing its confidential information while the case proceeds.A second motion filed the same day asks for expedited discovery, including documents showing how the defendants allegedly reached Apple's proprietary material. Apple wants depositions from Chang Liu, a former senior system electrical engineer, and Tang Yew Tan, who led product design for the iPhone and Apple Watch before leaving after 24 years. Also named: OpenAI employee Yu-Ting Peng, an unnamed OpenAI staffer who previously worked at Apple, and corporate representatives of OpenAI and io Products, the commercial arm listed as a defendant. "Apple will be irreparably harmed absent a preliminary injunction," the filing said.OpenAI says Apple's trade secrets case rests on a letter Apple's own lawyers misaddressedOpenAI answered in a blog post late Monday under the flat title "Apple is getting this wrong." The injunction request, it said, is based on false information and unnecessary, because the company does not have and does not want Apple's trade secrets.The post then went after Apple's timeline. Apple's suit claims it wrote to OpenAI in February and heard nothing back. OpenAI says Apple's outside counsel at Weil, Gotshal & Manges emailed the wrong person after confusing two similar last names, then thanked general counsel Che Chang for a phone call that never took place. Chang's reply to Apple's in-house lawyers is blunt: he had never spoken to the man. Apple's own counsel later confirmed the mix-up. Five months of silence followed before the lawsuit landed on July 10.Apple staff asked Chang Liu for files after he left, the iMessages OpenAI published showOpenAI also published redacted iMessages between Liu and his former Apple colleagues, dated after his January 22 exit. In them, Apple employees ask Liu to help locate files, hunt for a spare 64GB drive, and keep his iCloud account signed in on an Apple laptop while transfers finish. One colleague later confirms he signed out and kept no copies. OpenAI's argument is that this is Apple's own offboarding failure, leaving departing staff with access they never asked for.Apple's original complaint alleged OpenAI pressed Apple job candidates for details on unreleased projects and asked them to bring components and prototypes to interviews. More than 400 former Apple employees now work there, many arriving through the $6.5 billion io acquisition that brought Jony Ive and roughly 55 engineers across.Underneath the legal filings sits the actual prize: a pocketable AI device that skips apps and operating systems, and pulls attention away from the iPhone.