Apple’s roughly 40-page trade-secret complaint against OpenAI, filed July 10 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, names former iPhone executive Tang Tan as the central figure but conspicuously avoids mentioning Jony Ive by name, even though Ive leads design on OpenAI’s entire hardware lineup. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, that omission was deliberate, and the reasoning runs deeper than the absence of concrete evidence.
The Powell Jobs factor
Laurene Powell Jobs emerges as a key reason Apple kept Ive off the complaint. Powell Jobs was an early investor in Ive’s startup io Products, the company OpenAI acquired last year for $6.5 billion. She and Ive are close friends, and her relationship with Apple’s current leadership is equally close. At Apple’s June Worldwide Developers Conference, she sat in the front row alongside CEO Tim Cook and his successor John Ternus, a visible signal of where she stands with the company. Naming Ive in a lawsuit would have put Apple in direct conflict with someone whose goodwill matters to the people running it.
The optics problem compounds the relationship problem as Tan is a relatively obscure figure outside the industry. Ive is one of the most recognizable designers in tech history, the person credited with the iMac G3, the original iPhone, and the iPhone and Apple Watch product design. Dragging him into a trade-secret complaint would have generated immediate public sympathy for Ive and made Apple’s lawsuit look more like a grudge than a genuine legal action.
What Apple actually alleges
The complaint centers on Tan, who served as VP of product design at Apple before leaving in February 2024 to work with Ive. Apple accuses Tan of coaching recruits to bypass security measures and bring Apple hardware into job interviews for what the filing describes as “show-and-tell” sessions. The complaint also names Chang Liu, a former senior system electrical engineer who spent eight years at Apple before joining OpenAI in January 2026.
More than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI, and the poaching was concentrated enough in Apple’s iPhone product design group that the company had to rebuild parts of that team. Apple has since responded with larger retention bonuses and executives personally intervening to prevent further departures.
The complaint refers only to unnamed “former Apple leaders” in sections that would naturally describe Ive’s role. Gurman reports that part of the reason for that phrasing is genuine: Ive is reportedly not closely involved in OpenAI’s day-to-day recruiting or engineering operations.
The discovery problem Apple created for itself
Keeping Ive off the complaint does not keep him out of the lawsuit. If this case proceeds through discovery, OpenAI could call Ive as a witness with relevant knowledge of how the hardware products were developed. Apple would then face a choice it clearly wanted to avoid: accept his testimony, try to challenge it, or attempt to undermine the account of the executive responsible for shaping its most iconic products. None of those options are comfortable, and structuring the complaint around Tan while hoping Ive stays on the sidelines is a bet that this settles before depositions get that far.
OpenAI issued a statement on July 14 saying it is “not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit.” The company says its hardware timeline remains unchanged despite the lawsuit, with its first product still expected to unveil this year and ship in 2027.
Gurman’s dual explanation, that Apple both lacks direct evidence against Ive and has strong relationship-based reasons to leave him out, is probably true on both counts. But the fact that those two motivations happen to align so neatly is exactly the kind of contradiction that will surface in discovery or at trial.
