Apple Asks the Court to Keep Its OpenAI Case Alive

What was filed, and when

Apple sued on 10 July in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division. Five defendants are named: two OpenAI entities — OpenAI Foundation and OpenAI Group PBC — its hardware arm io Products, and two former Apple employees. Tang Tan spent twenty-four years at Apple and left as vice-president of product design for iPhone and Apple Watch; he is now OpenAI's chief hardware officer. Chang Liu was a senior systems electrical engineer with eight years at the company. The case is docketed as Apple Inc. v. Liu et al., No. 5:26-cv-07078-EJD.

On 5 August, the defendants moved to dismiss. Apple's opposition landed on 19 August. According to AppleInsider, which reviewed the document, Apple accuses the defendants of building their motion on "distortion, speculation, and improper extrinsic evidence." 9to5Mac published the filing in full. Apple's closing line asks the court to deny the motion in its entirety. A separate hearing, on Apple's request to accelerate discovery, is scheduled for 1 October.

A motion to dismiss is not a verdict

A motion to dismiss does not ask whether the plaintiff is right. It asks whether the complaint, assuming every factual allegation in it is true, describes something the law would recognise as a wrong. The judge does not weigh evidence, does not decide who is more credible, and does not resolve competing accounts. The phrase Apple quotes in its filing — enough facts to state a claim that is "plausible on its face" — comes from the Supreme Court's 2007 Twombly decision, a threshold the Court extended to all federal civil litigation in Iqbal two years later.

That standard is deliberately low, and it explains the shape of Apple's response. Much of the opposition is not a defence of the underlying accusations but an objection to method: that OpenAI is asking the court to adopt its own version of events, at a stage where the rules require the opposite. "Defendants rely on attorney argument or extrinsic evidence, hypothesize about implausible explanations for a Defendant's 'innocent' misconduct, and ask the Court to draw inferences in their own favor," the filing says. "That is not how a motion to dismiss works."

The three doors OpenAI tried

OpenAI's motion, filed on 5 August, was built on three arguments: that Apple has not shown it owns a protectable trade secret at all, that the conduct described does not amount to misappropriation, and that Apple has not plausibly alleged any injury or continuing harm. Each is a separate exit from the case, and any one of them succeeding would narrow it considerably.

The first is the most interesting, because it turns Apple's own security practices into the defence. Under the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act, information only qualifies as a trade secret if its owner has taken reasonable measures to keep it secret. OpenAI's filing argues that Apple encouraged staff to use personal iCloud accounts for work and failed to cut off access when people left — and that what Apple now calls theft was the predictable consequence of its own offboarding. TechCrunch, reviewing the exhibits, likened the defence to an unlocked-door argument while underlining its legal weight: information that was not properly secured may not be a trade secret in law. Apple's 19 August filing answers that head on, calling the claim about personal iCloud accounts attorney argument unsupported by evidence.

Two men, two versions

Apple's complaint alleges that after leaving, Chang Liu exploited an authentication bug to reach a cloud repository of confidential Apple files, remarked "LOL … so funny" on discovering he could, and spent weeks downloading dozens of confidential files while working on hardware for OpenAI. OpenAI published a redacted message exchange on its own site showing a serving Apple manager contacting Liu for help with technical questions, and argues that the exchange shows the access was ordinary post-departure assistance.

Apple's answer draws a line between the two things. "A manager's transition question is not authorization to raid Apple's confidential repository," the filing says, adding that the complaint never alleged Liu answered his former manager's questions in the first place. The same structure applies to Tang Tan. OpenAI says he asked interview candidates to bring parts “anyone can buy”. Apple's filing quotes the specifics it says were requested — batteries, main logic boards, shields, described as "some parts [she] worked on" — and observes that nobody needs a show-and-tell session for products already on sale.

Why a lawsuit and not a non-compete

Californian law shapes the whole case. The state voids employee non-compete agreements, with narrow exceptions, and has strengthened that prohibition in recent years. An Apple engineer can walk across the valley to a competitor on Monday, and the more than four hundred former Apple employees Apple says now work at OpenAI are not, by themselves, evidence of anything unlawful. Apple's own filing draws that distinction, setting generic hiring against what it calls numerous and specific allegations of actual misappropriation.

That leaves trade secret law as the only lever available, and it is a demanding one. It requires pointing at specific information, specific acts and specific people rather than at a pattern of hiring. Apple's opposition leans hard on precisely that framing: the complaint, it insists, "is about specific individuals taking specific Apple trade secrets in specific ways." Whether the court agrees is the question on the table.

What it changes for the products in your pocket

Nothing, for now, and probably nothing for a long while. No injunction has issued, no product has been enjoined, and OpenAI's hardware has not been announced. What is worth holding onto is that Apple's assistant strategy no longer runs through OpenAI: as we reported from WWDC 2026, Siri AI was built on Google's Gemini. Apple has not said whether its other arrangements with OpenAI have changed. What is established is narrower: the assistant itself no longer runs on technology from the company Apple is suing.

What to watch on 1 October

Two things will be clearer by autumn. Whether the judge lets the case proceed, and whether Apple gets the accelerated discovery it has asked for. The second may matter more than the first. Apple has told the court its internal investigation indicates that further former employees may have participated in, or witnessed, the alleged conduct, and discovery is where texts, emails and internal documents surface. OpenAI, for its part, has said publicly that it has "no interest in other companies' trade secrets." Neither claim will be tested by a motion to dismiss.