Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its hardware chief on Friday for allegedly stealing the iPhone-maker’s trade secrets, including unreleased parts and prototypes, confidential designs, and documents about stealth projects.

The lawsuit accuses OpenAI chief hardware officer Tang Tan, who spent 24 years at Apple and oversaw iPhone product design, and his colleagues at the AI company of encouraging people departing or considering leaving Apple to bring with them proprietary and unreleased technology. Tan allegedly helped coach recruits on how to evade Apple’s data security protocols and directed them to bring confidential Apple parts to job interviews at OpenAI.

“OpenAI’s nascent hardware business now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets,” Apple says in the lawsuit, which was filed in US district court in San Jose. The company describes OpenAI as resorting “to taking unlawful shortcuts” while under “mounting pressure to deliver its first commercial hardware product.”

OpenAI and Tan did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Apple spokesperson Hannah Smith says the company “will always defend our teams' hard work and innovations, and we are taking all appropriate steps to do so."

The lawsuit opens what may become the highest-stakes and most dramatic battle over intellectual property theft in Silicon Valley since autonomous ride-hailing company Waymo in 2017 accused Uber of stealing hardware designs when it brought on a former Waymo engineer who had left with thousands of confidential files. Uber agreed to pay $245 million to settle the lawsuit during the middle of a trial the following year.

Apple and OpenAI have been partners since 2024, when the companies announced a landmark deal to distribute ChatGPT on iPhones, Macbooks, and ...