Apple sues OpenAI alleging theft of trade secrets tied to hardware and smartphone design

Apple has filed a trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that former Apple employees targeted Apple’s sensitive hardware and smartphone design information during hiring processes and after joining OpenAI. According to reporting by The Verge, Apple claims these ex-employees solicited trade secrets in job interviews—including requests for employees to bring Apple hardware outside company offices for demonstrations—and allegedly downloaded files from Apple’s servers related to hardware manufacturing.

OpenAI has publicly denied the allegations, and the company has not yet filed a formal legal response in public records. Legal experts consulted by The Verge characterized the allegations as serious but noted that many of the claims follow patterns commonly seen in trade secrets litigation, even if the scale and profile of the parties involved are unusual.

The lawsuit is unfolding at a pivotal moment for OpenAI, which has faced financial strain and executive turnover while attempting to compete in both enterprise and consumer AI markets. Apple, meanwhile, has a history of aggressively pursuing intellectual property litigation, including high-profile cases against Microsoft in the 1990s over copyright and against Samsung in the 2000s and early 2010s over patents. In those cases, Apple ultimately did not succeed in stopping competitors through litigation, though Samsung did pay approximately $1 billion in damages after years of litigation.

The litigation highlights broader industry tensions over talent and intellectual property as companies race to define the next computing era. Apple’s lawsuit suggests the company views OpenAI’s hiring of former Apple employees as part of a strategic effort to gain an edge in hardware and smartphone-adjacent AI, areas Apple has long dominated.