Apple sued OpenAI on July 10, alleging recruiters told job candidates to bring parts from unannounced products to interviews. The suit reveals a hardware gap at OpenAI.
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Apple filed a trade-secret lawsuit against OpenAI on 10 July 2026 in the Northern District of California. The complaint alleges that OpenAI recruiters asked Apple employees who were interviewing for jobs to bring "actual parts" – batteries and logic boards – from unannounced Apple products to their interviews.
Apple says the sessions were known internally at OpenAI as "Show and tell." The allegation maps a boundary the AI company could not cross on its own: building a consumer device at the scale Apple runs. OpenAI, valued as the frontier lab in large language models, reportedly needed physical hardware – parts Apple had not yet released – to advance its own product work.
The lawsuit does not specify which product lines the parts came from. Apple says the trade secrets involved were not publicly known and that OpenAI had no authorization to possess or discuss them.
OpenAI declined to comment. Apple's complaint seeks damages and an order barring OpenAI from using the allegedly stolen information.
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