Apple has officially filed a lawsuit against OpenAI over the "AI iPhone".

The "Santa Clara Pizza Hut" has finally made its official move.

On local time July 10, Apple officially filed a lawsuit alleging that OpenAI stole the company's trade secrets by recruiting former Apple employees.

According to the lawsuit details, a former senior Apple electrical engineer named Chang Liu discovered he still had access to Apple's cloud file storage after leaving the company. The reason was that he retained the company-issued laptop when he resigned, and a vulnerability in Apple's system allowed him to continue accessing internal files after his departure.

Apple specifically named OpenAI's Chief Hardware Officer Tang Tan in its court documents, alleging that these actions were directly directed by OpenAI's senior leadership.

Apple wrote in the lawsuit: "This is just the tip of the iceberg — these improper practices have become normalized there, modeled by the leadership."

If this statement is true, this is no longer just an individual mistake by a former employee, but a systematic intelligence-gathering mechanism.

Tang Tan was originally a core figure at Apple, long responsible for hardware R&D for the Apple Watch and wearable devices. He joined OpenAI as "Chief Hardware Officer" — a position that barely existed at OpenAI just a year ago.

This shows that OpenAI's establishment of a hardware division was not a whim, but a deliberate effort to build a dedicated team.

Apple also mentioned in its complaint that more than 400 former Apple employees are currently working at OpenAI. This is no ordinary recruitment — it's OpenAI launching a targeted, full-scale assault on Apple's hardware team!

01 The Failed Partnership

To understand today's lawsuit, we have to go back to that handshake in 2024.

That year, Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into iOS. The demo at the keynote looked impressive, with Tim Cook and Sam Altman each making remarks that sounded like mutual appreciation.

But frictions beneath the partnership never went away.

Apple worried that OpenAI's privacy standards were not strict enough, and was uneasy about handing over user data to a third party it couldn't fully control. OpenAI, on the other hand, grew increasingly frustrated that Apple buried the ChatGPT access point too deeply, making it unreachable for ordinary users, while the agreed revenue split fell far short of expectations.

An OpenAI executive described the situation vividly: "They basically said OpenAI needed to take a leap of faith and trust us, and it didn't work out."

A leap of faith. In business partnerships, that phrase is usually the last step before a collapse.

By May this year, Bloomberg was already reporting that OpenAI was considering suing Apple for breach of contract. It was only a matter of time before one of the two companies struck first.

In the end, Apple moved first.

02 OpenAI's Unspoken Troubles

Over the past two weeks, if you only looked at OpenAI's product moves, it would be easy to think the company was in some kind of hyperactive state.

On July 9, it released its flagship model GPT-5.6 Sol, alongside Terra and Luna, emphasizing stronger advanced reasoning and long-term agent capabilities. On the same day, it launched GPT-Live-1, a full-duplex voice model that claims to make AI conversations feel more natural. A few days ago, news emerged of negotiations to transfer a 5% stake to the U.S. government — at a valuation of $8.52 trillion, that stake would be worth roughly 426 billion RMB.

Dense product launches, a soaring valuation, frequent moves — this is the rhythm of a company preparing for an IPO.

Then Apple's lawsuit arrived.

CNBC's analysis put it bluntly: This lawsuit adds another risk variable to OpenAI's already anticipated historic IPO. Two months ago, OpenAI had just won a high-profile lawsuit from Elon Musk. Now it has to face another opponent of an entirely different magnitude in court.

Apple's accumulated expertise in hardware and supply chains is something OpenAI's hardware team would take many years to even approach. The timing of this lawsuit lands exactly when OpenAI's hardware business is at its most vulnerable.

Apple itself spelled this out in the complaint, stating that "OpenAI's nascent hardware business now rests on the most fragile foundation, corrupted by its unlawful reliance on misappropriated trade secrets."

03 No One Wants to Miss the AI iPhone

To be honest, talent flow in Silicon Valley has never been entirely "clean."

Engineers jumping to competitors with memories of their former employer's architecture, knowledge of unreleased products, and insight into internal team decision-making — this happens every day, and most of the time, everyone chooses to turn a blind eye.

But this situation is different.

Tang Tan is no ordinary engineer; he's one of the leaders of Apple's core hardware lines. The laptop in Chang Liu's case is more like a metaphor — someone didn't just take away memories, but kept a key to get back in.

If Apple's lawsuit prevails, it will not only resolve this single case, but send a signal: AI companies that systematically poach talent to steal core intellectual property from competitors while building their hardware teams will face legal consequences.

The deterrent value of this for the entire industry could far exceed the final compensation amount.

Industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo previously predicted that the device OpenAI is developing could be a smartphone that relies on AI agents instead of traditional apps. If this prediction holds true, the competition between OpenAI and Apple is not just an AI company trying to grab market share from a traditional tech firm — it's a direct assault on the core logic of the iPhone.

The two companies were inevitably destined for a head-on confrontation — a outcome almost everyone saw coming. No one expected it to start, though, with an unreturned laptop.

Sometimes the trigger for a major showdown is just such an ordinary thing.

Apple will also launch a redesigned Siri later this year, capable of cross-app operations and leveraging local iPhone user data to deliver personalized responses. OpenAI has just updated its new models, its hardware team is still under construction, and now it faces an additional legal hurdle on the road to its IPO.

The courtroom battle might just be the easiest part of the full-scale war between Apple and OpenAI.

This article originates from the WeChat public account "GeekPark" (ID: geekpark), authored by Hulin Wuwang, and republished with authorization from 36Kr.