For "AI iPhone", Apple Officially Sues OpenAI
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For "AI iPhone", Apple Officially Sues OpenAI
This time Apple is serious.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Hua Lin Wu Wang
The "Santa Clara Pizza Hut" has finally made its official move.
On July 10 local time, Apple Inc. formally filed a lawsuit, alleging that OpenAI stole company secrets by recruiting former Apple employees.
According to the lawsuit information, a former Apple senior electrical engineer named Chang Liu found that he could still access Apple's cloud file storage after leaving the company. The reason was that he kept the laptop issued by the company when he resigned, and a loophole in Apple's system allowed him to continue reading internal files after departure.
Apple named OpenAI's Chief Hardware Officer Tang Tan in the lawsuit documents, alleging that these actions were directly guided by OpenAI's senior leadership.
Apple wrote in the lawsuit, "This is just the tip of the iceberg; such misconduct has become the norm there and is demonstrated by the leadership."
If this statement is true, this is not just an individual mistake by a former employee, but a systematic intelligence gathering mechanism.
Tang Tan was originally a key figure at Apple, long responsible for hardware R&D for Apple Watch and wearable devices. He joined OpenAI as "Chief Hardware Officer"—a position that basically did not exist at OpenAI a year ago.
This shows that OpenAI establishing a hardware department was not a whim, but a serious effort to build a team.
Apple also mentioned in the complaint that currently more than 400 former Apple employees are working at OpenAI. This is not ordinary recruitment; this is OpenAI conducting targeted demolition of Apple's hardware team in an organized manner!
01 A Failed Partnership
To understand today's lawsuit, we must go back to that handshake in 2024.
That year, Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into iOS. It was presented beautifully at the launch event, with Cook and Altman each saying things that sounded like mutual appreciation.
But the friction behind the partnership has always been there.
Apple worried that OpenAI's privacy standards were not strict enough and was reluctant to hand over user data to a third party it could not control. OpenAI, on the other hand, became increasingly annoyed, feeling that Apple hid the ChatGPT entry point too deep, where ordinary users could barely reach it, and the agreed revenue sharing fell far short of expectations.
A description by an OpenAI executive vividly illustrated the situation at the time: "They basically said OpenAI needs to take a leap of faith and trust us, the results are not good."
Leap of faith. In business partnerships, this phrase is usually the last step before a collapse.
By May this year, Bloomberg was already reporting that OpenAI was considering filing a lawsuit against Apple for breach of contract. Which of the two companies would make the first move was just a matter of time.
Ultimately, Apple made the first move.
02 OpenAI's Hardships
In the past two weeks, if one looks only at OpenAI's product moves, it is easy to feel that the company is in a state of excitement.
On July 9, the GPT-5.6 Sol flagship model was released, along with Terra and Luna, emphasizing stronger frontier reasoning and long-term agent work capabilities. On the same day, the GPT-Live-1 full-duplex voice model was launched, claiming to make conversations with AI feel more natural. A few days ago, news surfaced about negotiations to transfer 5% equity to the U.S. government—calculated at a valuation of $852 billion, this equity stake is worth approximately 42.6 billion RMB.
Dense product releases, elevated valuation, frequent moves. This is the rhythm of a company preparing for an IPO.
Then, Apple's complaint arrived.
CNBC's analysis was direct: This lawsuit adds another risk variable to OpenAI's IPO, which was already expected to be historic. Two months ago, OpenAI just won a high-profile lawsuit against Elon Musk. Now, it has to face another opponent of a completely different scale in court.
Apple's accumulation in hardware and supply chain is something OpenAI's hardware team would need many years to approach. The timing of this lawsuit coincides exactly with the most vulnerable stage of OpenAI's hardware business.
Apple itself pointed this out in the complaint, saying "OpenAI's emerging hardware business is now built on the most vulnerable foundation, corrupted by its illegal reliance on infringed trade secrets."
03 No One Wants to Miss the AI iPhone
To be honest, talent flow in Silicon Valley has never been that "clean."
Engineers switching jobs to competitors with memories of their former employer's architecture, knowledge of unreleased products, and understanding of internal team decision paths—this happens every day, it's just that most of the time, everyone chooses to turn a blind eye.
But this situation is somewhat different.
Tang Tan is not an ordinary engineer; he is one of the heads of Apple's core hardware lines. The laptop in Chang Liu's case is more like a metaphor—someone not only took away memories but also kept a key to continue entering.
If Apple's lawsuit holds, it establishes not just this case, but a signal: There are legal consequences for AI companies acquiring competitors' core intellectual property through systematic poaching during the process of building hardware teams.
The deterrent value for the entire industry may be far greater than the final compensation amount.
Industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo previously analyzed that the device OpenAI is developing might be a smartphone reliant on AI agents rather than traditional apps. If this directional judgment is true, the competition between OpenAI and Apple is not an AI company trying to grab market share from a traditional tech company, but directly targeting the core logic of the iPhone.
The two companies were inevitably destined for a head-on confrontation—this is probably an ending everyone knew long ago. It's just unexpected that the twist started with a laptop that was not returned.
Sometimes the fuse of a big drama is just such an ordinary thing.
Apple will also launch a redesigned Siri later this year, supporting cross-app work and calling user iPhone local data for personalized answers. OpenAI's new model has just been updated, the hardware team is still being built, and there is one more legal obstacle on the road to IPO.
The battle in court may be the easiest part of the war between Apple and OpenAI.
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