OpenAI has filed a motion to dismiss Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit, pushing back formally in court just days after the two companies exchanged increasingly combative public statements over allegations that former Apple employees funneled confidential hardware information to OpenAI’s device business, as per a report by Axios.
Apple filed suit on July 10, 2026, naming former Apple engineer Chang Liu and former design executive Tang Tan as defendants who allegedly ran a scheme to pass confidential product information to OpenAI’s hardware division. On August 4, Apple filed a request for a preliminary injunction, arguing it will be “irreparably harmed” by the ongoing disclosure of its trade secrets, and sought expedited discovery covering five categories of information. OpenAI agreed to the first three but disputed the final two, which relate to the conditions of the preliminary injunction.
Hours after Apple’s injunction filing, OpenAI published a blog post titled “Apple is getting this wrong,” describing the lawsuit as “careless, aggressive and oddly personal.” The post included iMessage exchanges that OpenAI says show Apple employees continuing to contact Liu after his January 22 departure, asking him to locate files and technical information and directing a colleague to AirDrop files from his Apple-linked iCloud account access. An Apple employee was still asking Liu about internal files as late as March 5, with another participant in the thread describing the exchange as “highly irregular.”
OpenAI also published the email chain underlying a pre-litigation contact dispute. Apple’s outside counsel had emailed the wrong person in February, reportedly confusing two Asian last names, and subsequently issued an apology. OpenAI says it received nothing further about the specific allegations for five months before the suit was filed, a timeline it is using to argue procedural unfairness and complicate Apple’s damages narrative.
One clarification matters for the injunction proceedings: while Apple seeks discovery into what Liu accessed from personal storage accounts, including iCloud, after his departure, the unauthorized downloads at the heart of the complaint relate to Apple’s third-party cloud storage, which is reportedly Box, not iCloud activity.
Tang Tan spent 24 years at Apple before co-founding io Products with Jony Ive, the hardware startup that merged with OpenAI in a $6.5 billion deal in July 2025. OpenAI has defended Tan directly, stating: “Tang has always been clear with the team that we do not want, and must not use, any confidential information from other companies.” Apple’s complaint also notes that more than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI, a figure that cuts both ways, supporting Apple’s theory of systematic recruiting while simultaneously raising the question of how much of that movement constitutes normal industry brain drain rather than coordinated IP extraction.
The next major date is October 1, 2026, when the court will hear Apple’s preliminary injunction request. If Apple prevails, OpenAI could be barred from accessing or using the disputed information during the full litigation, which would put meaningful pressure on its hardware development timeline at precisely the moment Jony Ive’s device ambitions are becoming concrete. OpenAI’s motion to dismiss attempts to short-circuit that outcome before the hearing, but the iMessage evidence it has surfaced is a double-edged tool: compelling in public, but subject to whatever context Apple’s discovery requests ultimately produce.
