Apple has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI accusing the AI company of stealing trade secrets through its hiring practices, according to reports from multiple outlets including WION and Ukraine's Межа.
WION describes the filing as a 41-page complaint that accuses OpenAI of taking metal-finishing secrets, battery designs, supplier details and prototypes. The report also references "show and tell" job interviews, in which candidates allegedly walked through confidential work, and an engineer who reportedly retained network access.
The timing matters because OpenAI has been openly working toward its own hardware ambitions. Crypto Briefing and The Tech Buzz both frame the suit as a threat to those hardware plans, with The Tech Buzz adding that it could also complicate OpenAI's IPO timeline. On TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts debated directly whether the lawsuit could derail OpenAI's much-discussed push into devices and its path to going public.
One detail has drawn particular attention: former Apple design chief Jony Ive, who is now closely tied to OpenAI's hardware effort, is not named in the suit. According to Firstpost, reports suggest Apple left Ive out because of his limited hardware role and his enduring ties to the company. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, cited via Techmeme, notes that Ive is a close friend of Laurene Powell Jobs and weighs in on why he is absent from the complaint. PhoneArena characterizes the omission as deliberate.
Gurman, according to the same Techmeme summary, separately reports that Apple is testing AI to record customer conversations at its Genius Bar.
The sources do not detail OpenAI's response or the specific damages Apple is seeking.
Why it matters: the fight pits the world's most valuable device maker against the most prominent AI startup at the exact moment OpenAI is trying to build hardware and go public — and how it resolves could shape who controls the next generation of consumer AI gadgets.