Apple says it has found "shocking evidence" that OpenAI used its stolen trade secrets, and it wants a judge to speed up discovery before more disappears.
Apple sued OpenAI, its hardware venture io Products, and two former Apple employees in July, accusing them of taking trade secrets for AI hardware development. In a new court filing, Apple says forensic analysis of a MacBook returned by former iPhone engineer Chang Liu shows he used a downloaded confidential Apple circuit schematic and an internally named Apple engineering tool in his work at OpenAI. Apple also claims Liu ran the schematic through an AI agent, which could bake the trade secret into model training in ways that are hard to reverse, and that he asked a colleague to destroy evidence once he learned Apple was investigating him. Apple now wants OpenAI to hand over a Mac mini that synced with Liu's old laptop.
OpenAI hardware chief Tang Yew Tan, the other named defendant, spent 24 years at Apple before joining Sam Altman's company, and Apple says more than 400 of its former employees now work there. Talent migration between the two companies is routine in Silicon Valley, but it turns any hardware dispute into a test of how porous the wall between employers really is, and how much a schematic can travel before it becomes untraceable inside an AI model.
OpenAI has denied wrongdoing and released text messages it says undercut Apple's account, so for now this is one side's story, told in language dramatic enough to double as a press strategy.