Apple's San Jose federal suit accuses OpenAI and chief hardware officer Tang Tan of pulling confidential iPhone designs and stealth project documents through targeted Apple hires.
Apple sued OpenAI on Friday in federal court in San Jose, alleging the company and Tang Tan ran a scheme to pull confidential iPhone designs, unreleased-product specs, and stealth-project documents out of Apple through targeted hires of its own employees.
The complaint, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California on July 10, 2026, describes a specific pipeline rather than a string of individual poachings. Apple alleges Tan and other OpenAI recruiters coached candidates to evade Apple's data-security protocols and directed them to bring confidential Apple parts, prototypes, and internal project documents to OpenAI job interviews, according to the suit reported by Wired.
Tan spent roughly 24 years at Apple and oversaw iPhone product design before leaving for OpenAI's hardware unit. Apple argues in the complaint that OpenAI's "nascent hardware business now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets," and that the company turned to "unlawful shortcuts" while under "mounting pressure to deliver its first commercial hardware product," per the filing quoted by Wired. Those characterizations are Apple's allegations, not findings.
The lawsuit lands in the middle of an open effort by OpenAI to build a consumer-hardware business to pair with its AI models. OpenAI has hired more than 400 former Apple employees to staff that push, according to 9to5Mac. Apple and OpenAI still partner on AI features inside iOS, but Apple has been leaning harder on Google Gemini as that relationship has frayed, the same filing context makes clear.
This is the most prominent Silicon Valley trade-secret case since Waymo sued Uber in 2017 over self-driving technology, a dispute that ended with Uber paying roughly $245 million to settle, as Finimize notes. Apple's allegation, if proven, would describe a structured counter-hire program designed to convert routine departures into a channel for protected hardware designs.
OpenAI and Tan did not immediately respond to requests for comment at filing. An Apple spokesperson, Hannah Smith, said the company "will always defend" its people and IP, per Wired. The complaint's specific trade-secret items, including what parts, prototypes, and stealth-project files were allegedly taken, remain litigated claims, not adjudicated facts. TechCrunch treats them under the same theory of liability.
The filing targets more than Tan. Apple accuses him of recruiting colleagues who, in turn, recruited other Apple employees and near-departures while Apple projects were still in flight. The pattern, as Apple describes it, turns the standard "people move, knowledge follows" logic of Silicon Valley into an alleged systematic extraction effort, with MacRumors confirming the venue, the parties, and the complaint's trade-secret framing.
OpenAI's planned consumer-hardware launch, the timing and form of which Apple implicitly attacks in the complaint, now sits behind a federal suit. The next OpenAI filing, or a sealed Apple exhibit list, will set how much of the alleged pipeline survives discovery.