OpenAI asked a federal judge on Wednesday to throw out Apple's trade-secrets lawsuit, filing a 31-page motion that characterizes the iPhone maker's complaint as a tactical weapon rather than a legitimate legal grievance. "Plainly filed without adequate investigation and built on selectively excerpted communications and ordinary conduct stripped of context, Apple's complaint is, to borrow its own phrase, 'rotten to its core,'" OpenAI said in the court filing. The underlying suit charges OpenAI and two of its hires from Apple with trade-secret theft and using job interviews to extract confidential information. The judge is set to hear arguments on the motion on October 1.
The legal collision between two companies that were still nominally partners as recently as early 2025 traces a precise arc. Apple and OpenAI announced their official partnership in June 2024, integrating ChatGPT into Siri across more than a billion active devices; the relationship deteriorated after Apple announced Google Gemini would power Siri in January 2026, effectively demoting OpenAI from its default position. The suit names OpenAI, its hardware-focused subsidiary io Products, and two former Apple employees: Chief Hardware Officer Tang Yew Tan and technical staffer Chang Liu; Apple's complaint notes that the total number of Apple alumni now working at OpenAI exceeds 400. Apple's specific allegations against Liu are detailed: Apple's complaint says Liu accessed and downloaded "dozens of Apple's confidential hardware-related files, including voluminous, detailed information about unreleased products, engineering presentations, technical specifications, and proprietary project data." Apple further alleges that Tan used confidential company information when recruiting candidates, including instructing them to bring Apple parts during the interview process, and that Tan and OpenAI coached Apple employees on how to leave the company.
OpenAI's motion mounts two distinct defenses. On the legal front, OpenAI argues that "Apple's complaint fails to sufficiently describe the information for which it claims trade secret protection; its generalized product development categories are not sufficient to survive a motion to dismiss." On the factual front, OpenAI submitted records showing that an Apple manager remained logged into former engineer Chang Liu's personal account after he left, later seeking his help with technical questions, arguing that Apple's own offboarding practices created the very access gap it now calls theft. OpenAI also contends that its top hardware executive acted in line with industrywide recruiting standards when interviewing Apple employees, and that the worker accused of theft was actually trying to assist a former colleague at Apple. Apple, for its part, is pressing the counteroffensive simultaneously: Apple asked the same judge for a preliminary injunction that would bar OpenAI from using the alleged trade secrets while the case moves forward, and also filed a motion for expedited discovery, seeking depositions of the named defendants and corporate representatives from OpenAI and io Products.
The proceeding carries stakes well beyond its immediate parties. The motion is an early step in a legal fight that could stretch for years; if the case survives, discovery could expose sensitive details about both companies' hiring, hardware development, and data-security practices. The case also arrives in a newly crowded legal landscape: in June, a California judge dismissed a lawsuit from xAI, Elon Musk's AI company, alleging that OpenAI recruited a former xAI engineer to share information about the Grok chatbot, suggesting courts have been skeptical of overbroad recruiting-as-theft theories, though the specificity of Apple's file-download allegations distinguishes the two cases. OpenAI faces a court-ordered deadline of August 17 to file its response to Apple's request for a preliminary injunction.
If the October hearing does not end the case, both companies will spend the next year arguing in public, under oath, about what the next generation of AI hardware actually looks like.