OpenAI took Apple's trade-secret lawsuit public on August 4, 2026, publishing a blog post titled 'Apple is getting this wrong' that reproduces iMessages, emails, and legal correspondence the company says undercut Apple's version of events. The post calls Apple's suit 'careless, aggressive, and oddly personal' and lands three days after Apple filed on Monday for a preliminary injunction to block two former Apple engineers, and OpenAI itself, from touching any allegedly confidential material.
The dispute centers on Chang Liu, a former iPhone engineer now on OpenAI's technical team, and Tang Tan, who spent 25 years at Apple overseeing iPhone and Apple Watch design before becoming OpenAI's chief hardware officer. Apple filed the underlying suit last month, alleging the two carried 'secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes, and products' into OpenAI's hardware effort.
Apple's Monday filing asks the court to bar Liu, Tan, and OpenAI from accessing, acquiring, using, or disclosing the disputed material while the case proceeds. Reuters reported the request. The injunction, if granted, would sit on top of the broader claim and constrain how OpenAI's hardware group can operate during discovery.
Key facts
- 01OpenAI published a blog post titled 'Apple is getting this wrong' on August 4, 2026, calling Apple's suit 'careless, aggressive, and oddly personal.'
- 02The case centers on two former Apple employees now at OpenAI: iPhone engineer Chang Liu and Tang Tan, who spent 25 years at Apple before becoming OpenAI's chief hardware officer.
- 03Apple filed the lawsuit last month and requested a preliminary injunction on Monday to block Liu, Tan, and OpenAI from using alleged confidential information.
- 04OpenAI published iMessage and email exchanges between Liu and Apple staff, and between the companies' legal counsel, as evidence for its rebuttal.
- 05OpenAI says Apple's outside lawyers 'emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names,' undercutting a claim that OpenAI ignored Apple's inquiries.
OpenAI's blog post responds directly to the injunction motion. 'Apple's request for a preliminary injunction is both based on false information and completely unnecessary because we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets,' the company wrote.
“Apple's request for a preliminary injunction is both based on false information and completely unnecessary because we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets.”— OpenAI, company blog post
The specific allegations against Liu are the most detailed part of Apple's filing. Apple says Liu failed to return a company-owned computer, used an authentication vulnerability to reach Apple's cloud storage weeks after leaving, downloaded confidential files, and coached another Apple colleague on how to do the same and 'avoid trouble' with Apple security before she joined OpenAI. OpenAI's rebuttal reframes the sequence: it says Apple employees reached out to Liu after his departure and asked him to help locate the files in question, and that the residual access Apple now points to is a known consequence of Apple's own offboarding process.
'We're much more interested in building innovative products and technologies that push the frontier,' OpenAI wrote, positioning the fight as a distraction from product work.
“We're much more interested in building innovative products and technologies that push the frontier.”— OpenAI, company blog post
On Tan, Apple alleges he pressed Apple employees for confidential information during OpenAI job interviews and asked them to demonstrate Apple components they had worked on. OpenAI says Tan 'has always been clear with the team that we do not want, and must not use, any confidential information from other companies.' The post does not provide message-level evidence for that claim, in contrast to the Liu exchanges it reproduces in full.
OpenAI also disputes Apple's characterization of the pre-lawsuit communications between the two companies. Apple's filing suggested OpenAI ignored initial inquiries; OpenAI says Apple's outside counsel 'emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names' and has since conceded no substantive discussion occurred with OpenAI's General Counsel. The published emails are meant to show a paper trail that reads differently from Apple's summary.
Publishing private correspondence mid-litigation is unusual and carries risk. The exchanges OpenAI selected are cherry-picked by definition, and Apple will have the opportunity to introduce its own excerpts and full threads in court. Judges also tend to look poorly on parties who litigate through press releases, and Apple's team is likely to argue that the blog post itself demonstrates the kind of aggressive posture OpenAI is accusing Apple of. The injunction request has not yet been ruled on, and OpenAI has not filed its formal legal response to the complaint.
The broader stakes are about OpenAI's hardware push. Tan's hire signaled OpenAI's intent to build consumer hardware in a way that would inevitably invite comparison to Apple, and the company's device work with Jony Ive raises the same question from a different angle. Apple's suit, whatever its legal merits, functions as a discovery tool that could slow OpenAI's hardware roadmap and set constraints on which engineers can work on what. OpenAI's decision to fight publicly suggests it sees reputational damage from the trade-secret framing as more costly than the goodwill lost by airing the exchange.
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