Apple Just Told 40 Ex-Employees at OpenAI: Don’t Delete Anything

Imagine opening your email inbox at your new job and finding a letter from your old employer's lawyers telling you not to delete anything. That is roughly the week that about 40 former Apple engineers just had, all of them now working at OpenAI.

Apple has sent legal preservation letters to those ex-employees, ordering them to hold onto any documents and messages that might matter to a trade secret lawsuit the company filed last week. In plain terms, Apple is telling people it used to pay: whatever you have, keep it, because we may come looking.

The case centers on hardware, which is the interesting part. Apple claims OpenAI ran a coordinated effort to pull confidential information about how Apple engineers and builds its products, and it isn't framing this as a couple of bad apples. In its filing, Apple says more than 400 of its former employees now work at OpenAI, the kind of number a company cites when it wants to argue a pattern rather than a coincidence.

Two people are named directly. Tang Tan, now OpenAI's chief hardware officer, spent 24 years at Apple leading product design before he left. Chang Liu was a senior system electrical engineer at Apple and now sits on OpenAI's hardware team. Apple is bringing breach-of-contract claims against both, arguing they violated the agreements they signed on the way out.

What Apple actually wants is an injunction. It is asking a court to block OpenAI from using any Apple information as it builds its own hardware device, plus damages on top. That last part is the tell. OpenAI has never hidden its hardware ambitions, and Apple would very much like to slow down a rival that just hired a big chunk of the team that knows how Apple products get made.

OpenAI isn't backing down. The company denied the allegations and said it is "not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit." That is lawyer-speak for see you in court, and it is worth remembering that hiring your competitor's engineers isn't illegal on its own. Knowledge lives in people's heads, and people are allowed to change jobs. The line Apple has to prove is that something crossed over that should not have.

For now, nobody has to prove anything. The preservation letters are just the opening move, the legal equivalent of both sides making sure the evidence stays put.