Apple has escalated its trade-secrets fight with OpenAI, asking a federal judge to order the company and two former Apple employees to stop touching its confidential information — and OpenAI has fired back with what it says are the receipts that make the whole thing baseless.

The important thing to hold onto before the details: nothing here has been proven. Everything below is either an allegation in Apple's court filing or OpenAI's denial of it. No court has found any wrongdoing by anyone.

What Apple filed

The new move, filed the week of 3 August in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, is a motion for a preliminary injunction — not a new lawsuit, but an escalation within the case Apple brought on 10 July. Apple is asking the court to bar the defendants from using or disclosing its trade secrets and, in its own framing, to stop OpenAI from moving forward with an AI device or other products built on Apple's technology while the case proceeds.

In the filing, Apple makes several fresh allegations. It claims a former employee took screenshots of confidential documents relating to an unannounced Apple product before interviewing at OpenAI; that another discussed Apple proprietary information about unannounced products in a meeting; and that, after Apple sued, multiple former employees now at OpenAI reached out about returning Apple-issued work devices they had kept when they left. Again: these are Apple's claims in a motion, not findings.

The "11 more employees," carefully

The line drawing the most attention is Apple's statement that its continuing investigation "has so far revealed 11 other former Apple employees" beyond the two it originally named. It is worth reading Apple's own words precisely here, because the shorthand is misleading. Apple says those 11 "may have been witnesses or otherwise involved in the case" — not that they stole anything. They are not named, not defendants, and not accused of theft; some may simply be potential witnesses. Any version of this story that turns "11 more ex-employees" into "11 more people who took Apple's secrets" is inventing an accusation Apple did not make.

The case so far

Apple's original suit, filed 10 July, is against OpenAI; io Products, the hardware company co-founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive that OpenAI acquired in 2025; and two named former Apple employees — Tang Tan, a roughly two-decade Apple product veteran now leading OpenAI's hardware work, and Chang Liu, a former senior systems electrical engineer. Notably, Ive himself is not a defendant. As we covered when the suit was filed, Apple has alleged a pattern — confidential project code-names surfacing in recruiting, candidates asked to bring Apple hardware to interviews, retained laptops used to pull technical documents. All of it remains contested and unproven.

OpenAI's answer: "careless, aggressive and oddly personal"

OpenAI did not stay quiet. In a blog post this week it called Apple's allegations "careless, aggressive and oddly personal," said the injunction request was "both based on false information and completely unnecessary because we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets," and published what it described as iMessage and email exchanges intended to rebut Apple's account of events. It is an unusually combative, public response to a civil filing — a company answering a motion in the court of public opinion as much as in the courtroom.

The individual former employees have not, as far as reporting shows, commented separately from OpenAI. Nothing should be read into that silence either way.

What it actually amounts to

Stripped to what is verifiable: Apple has asked a court to restrain OpenAI and two named ex-employees while it presses trade-secrets claims, has widened its investigation to reference other former staff as possible witnesses, and has made specific new allegations about screenshots and retained devices. OpenAI denies the substance and says it has evidence to prove it. A judge has found none of it either way — the injunction motion is exactly the point at which that gets argued.

It sits inside a broader pattern worth noting without overstating: as frontier AI labs hire aggressively from Big Tech's hardware and research ranks, the trade-secrets suits have followed. OpenAI's own hardware push, built around its acquisition of Ive's io and a wave of Apple hires, is precisely the backdrop Apple's claims grow out of. The talent is moving faster than the litigation can resolve — which is why the next thing to watch is not another accusation, but whether the court grants Apple's injunction.