OpenAI moves to dismiss Apple trade secrets lawsuit

OpenAI moves to dismiss Apple trade secrets lawsuit

Thu, August 6, 2026 at 3:42 PM GMT+3 2 min read

OpenAI filed a motion Wednesday seeking dismissal of Apple's lawsuit, which charges the AI company and two of its hires from Apple with trade-secret theft and using job interviews to extract confidential information.

In the 31-page filing, OpenAI argued that Apple failed to sufficiently describe the information it claims as trade secrets and did not demonstrate it owned a protectable trade secret or plausibly allege misappropriation by any of the defendants. "Apple should not be permitted to use a baseless and pretextual lawsuit to make up for its shortcomings in the market for talent and retaining its employees, and its failures to integrate AI into its products," the motion says. Variations of the word "fail" appear nearly 50 times in the filing.

OpenAI also challenged Apple's account of the underlying facts, contending that Apple itself had reviewed employees' personal iMessages stored on corporate devices and sowed confusion by directing staff to use personal iCloud accounts for work purposes, which mixed private and employer data together. "Apple cannot transform the foreseeable consequences of its own systems and policies into evidence of theft by former employees who were not aware of their latent access," the filing states. OpenAI also contended that it has no need for Apple's trade secrets, citing its quoted assertion in the filing that it is "building something entirely new and different from anything at Apple."

Apple's complaint, which was filed last month, accused former employees of walking out with confidential information and alleged that OpenAI used its recruiting process to extract Apple trade secrets from job candidates. The lawsuit named OpenAI, its hardware-focused subsidiary io Products, and two former Apple employees — Chief Hardware Officer Tang Yew Tan and technical staffer Chang Liu — and claimed that the total number of Apple alumni now working at OpenAI exceeds 400.

Earlier this week, Apple asked the same judge for a preliminary injunction that would bar OpenAI from using the alleged trade secrets while the case moves forward. Apple also filed a motion for expedited discovery, seeking depositions of the named defendants and corporate representatives from OpenAI and io Products. OpenAI responded in a blog post calling Apple's injunction request "based on false information and completely unnecessary."

The case centers on a broader competition between the two companies to build AI hardware. Analysts believe OpenAI is working on a phone or other device of its own, according to Reuters. The two companies have an existing partnership that allows Apple users to access ChatGPT through Siri, though Apple announced in June that a rebuilt version of Siri would run on Google Gemini instead. Should the case move past the motion to dismiss, the discovery process would likely surface internal information from both companies touching on recruitment, hardware roadmaps, and how each handles data security, according to Axios.