Apple sued OpenAI on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that the ChatGPT maker orchestrated a coordinated campaign to steal hardware trade secrets ahead of its planned move into consumer devices. The complaint also names OpenAI’s chief hardware officer Tang Tan, former Apple engineer Chang Liu, and IO Products, the design studio OpenAI acquired for $6.4 billion from former Apple designer Jony Ive, who isn’t named as a defendant.

The filing’s tone is unusually direct for Apple. “This much is clear, however: 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,” the company wrote.

The specifics matter. Tan, a 24-year Apple veteran who previously ran product design for the iPhone and Apple Watch, is accused of dropping Apple code names into recruiting conversations and asking candidates to bring parts to interviews for “show and tell” sessions. Liu, who left Apple in January 2026, allegedly kept his work laptop and pulled dozens of confidential engineering files, including presentations and technical specifications. Apple says it wrote to OpenAI in February raising concerns and got no reply.

OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri pushed back: “We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets.”

The suit lands at a delicate moment. OpenAI is expected to unveil a consumer device later this year and is preparing an IPO, both of which price the Ive-led hardware bet as central to the story it’s telling investors. Apple is asking the court to bar OpenAI from using the material and to compel the return of confidential documents. The complaint reads less like a routine trade-secrets action than like a strategic effort to make the hardware roadmap a legal liability during the IPO window.

Sources