Apple on Monday asked a U.S. judge for a preliminary injunction barring OpenAI and two former Apple employees — engineer Chang Liu and design executive Tang Tan — from accessing, using or disclosing alleged confidential information, along with a request for expedited discovery. "Apple will be irreparably harmed absent a preliminary injunction," the company said in its filing.
The motion escalates the trade secrets lawsuit Apple filed on July 10, which alleges that Liu and Tan ran a months-long scheme to funnel confidential product information to OpenAI's hardware business. Apple's complaint claims more than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI.
Hours later, OpenAI published a rebuttal titled "Apple is getting this wrong," calling the lawsuit "careless, aggressive and oddly personal." It disputes Apple's account of pre-litigation contact, saying Apple's outside counsel emailed the wrong person in February after confusing two Asian last names — and published the apology it received — adding that it heard nothing about the specific allegations for five months before the suit was filed.
OpenAI also published iMessage exchanges it says show Apple employees repeatedly asking Liu for help locating files after his January 22 departure, including directing a colleague to AirDrop files from his Apple-linked iCloud account. The messages show an Apple employee still asking about internal files as late as March 5, with another participant in the thread calling the exchange "highly irregular."
OpenAI defended Tan, who spent 24 years at Apple before co-founding io Products, the hardware startup backed by Jony Ive that merged with OpenAI in July 2025. "Tang has always been clear with the team that we do not want, and must not use, any confidential information from other companies," OpenAI said. A hearing on the injunction request has not yet been scheduled.
