Judge orders OpenAI to turn over hiring records in Apple trade secrets fight

A federal judge in San Jose has handed Apple a partial win in its trade-secrets fight with OpenAI, ordering the ChatGPT maker to turn over internal hiring records and granting Apple's request to depose three people at the center of the dispute, while rejecting Apple's bid for faster access to OpenAI's own hardware research.

The order, issued Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Edward J. Davila in the Northern District of California, resolves — for now — a months-long argument over how much digging Apple can do before the case against OpenAI, its hardware unit io Products, and two former Apple employees goes to trial. The judge's order also vacated a hearing on the motion that had been scheduled for Wednesday, ruling on the papers instead.

What the judge decided

Judge Davila's order granted, denied and deferred parts of Apple's motion for expedited discovery, which Apple had filed alongside a separate request for a preliminary injunction. On the granted side, Apple will get copies of OpenAI's internal interview materials for candidates who applied to its consumer hardware and robotics teams — among them checklists, interview guides, technical presentation scripts and notes from sessions that touched on Apple components or technology. OpenAI was given five days to produce whatever it has already collected and fourteen days for everything else.

The judge also cleared Apple to obtain LINE messaging app records involving Chang Liu, a former Apple engineer, and Yu-Ting "Alyssa" Peng, an OpenAI employee who is not named as a defendant, and he approved depositions of Liu, Peng and Tang Yew Tan, OpenAI's chief hardware officer and a longtime Apple design executive before that. What Apple did not get, at least for now, was expedited access to OpenAI's own research in areas like metal finishes, power management and battery design, or broader records of what the former Apple employees built once they arrived at OpenAI. Judge Davila left the door open for Apple to come back with narrower requests on those points.

The numbers

The case, Apple Inc. v. Liu, No. 5:26-cv-07078-EJD, was filed July 10 in the San Jose division of the Northern District of California. Apple's complaint, built around the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act and two breach-of-contract claims, names OpenAI's foundation and its public-benefit corporation, io Products LLC, Liu and Tan as defendants. Apple's motion for expedited discovery, filed August 3, had asked for sworn answers within 30 days and a corporate deposition of OpenAI within 50. In a later filing, Apple told the court its "continuing investigation" had turned up eleven additional former Apple employees who may have witnessed or taken part in the conduct it is suing over.

How the dispute began

Apple's lawsuit grew out of OpenAI's 2025 push into hardware. OpenAI paid roughly $6.5 billion in stock to acquire io Products, the startup founded by former Apple chief design officer Jony Ive, bringing over Ive's co-founders Tang Tan, Scott Cannon and Evans Hankey along with roughly fifty engineers and designers to work on what Ive and OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman have described as "unobtrusive" AI devices. Apple alleges Liu, a systems and electrical engineer who left for OpenAI, downloaded confidential files about unreleased Apple hardware before his departure, and that he and Peng — while Peng was still on Apple's payroll — fed each other internal updates and coached at least one additional Apple employee on what to bring up, and in one case what hardware to physically bring, when interviewing with OpenAI. Apple says that employee photographed confidential documents related to an unannounced Apple product shortly before an OpenAI interview.

OpenAI had already held a roughly 23 percent stake in io before the acquisition closed, and paid about $5 billion in stock for the remaining stake at a valuation that priced OpenAI itself at $300 billion. Ive's own design studio, LoveFrom, stayed independent but took on what OpenAI described as deep design and creative responsibilities across both companies. The deal, and the wave of senior Apple hardware talent that followed Ive out the door, is the backdrop against which Apple's lawsuit landed a year later.

OpenAI has denied the substance of the claims and moved in August to dismiss the case outright, arguing in court papers that the lawsuit is a pretextual attempt to slow a competitor rather than a genuine trade-secrets dispute. The case was initially assigned to a magistrate judge before being reassigned to Judge Davila, with Magistrate Judge Nathanael Cousins handling discovery disputes such as this one.

"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 said in response to Apple's injunction bid.

Who is affected

The order directly binds OpenAI's foundation and public-benefit corporation, io Products, Liu and Tan, who must now gather and hand over the ordered interview files on a tight clock. Peng, though not a defendant, is also pulled further into the case through the deposition order and the LINE-records request. For OpenAI, the ruling adds a legal distraction just as it tries to bring its first hardware product to market in competition with the company that trained much of its early design and engineering talent. For Apple, it is a modest but real procedural victory: the company gets a look inside how OpenAI recruited from Apple's hardware and robotics groups, material that could shape both the pending injunction motion and any eventual trial.

The dispute is also being watched as a test case for how trade-secrets law applies to the current wave of AI talent migration, in which senior hardware and design staff have moved between Apple, OpenAI, Meta and other companies racing to build the next consumer AI device. A ruling that lets Apple see how a rival recruited directly out of its design studios could make other companies more cautious about how they vet candidates with ties to competitors; a narrow reading would leave recruiters more room to ask what applicants know.

The ruling lands as Apple and OpenAI are already tangled in a separate piece of litigation — an antitrust suit brought by Elon Musk's X Corp and xAI accusing the two companies of striking an exclusive arrangement to favor ChatGPT on the iPhone, scheduled for trial in a Texas federal court later this month. The two disputes are legally unrelated, but together they underline how central the Apple-OpenAI relationship, equal parts partnership and rivalry, has become to the next phase of consumer AI hardware.

What happens next

OpenAI's production deadlines fall later this month: five days for already-collected hiring materials, fourteen for the rest. Depositions of Liu, Peng and Tan can now be scheduled, though no dates have been set publicly. Apple can still try to narrow and refile the discovery requests Judge Davila declined to expedite, meaning the fight over access to OpenAI's hardware research is likely to resurface. The preliminary injunction motion that prompted this discovery dispute remains undecided, and OpenAI's motion to dismiss the underlying case is still pending before Judge Davila as well. Absent a settlement, the case moves next toward briefing on both of those motions, with the broader trade-secrets claims still months from any resolution on the merits.