The list of names in Apple’s case against OpenAI has expanded by eleven. A newly submitted court filing says an internal probe identified 11 additional former employees who may have taken part in — or simply witnessed — the suspected leaking of trade secrets, alongside the two people Apple had already accused.
That reframes the argument entirely. Two named engineers looks like a staffing issue. Thirteen people looks like a pattern — and a pattern is precisely what Apple wants the judge to see.
What Apple wants from the court
The company is pushing for a preliminary injunction that would halt OpenAI’s development of any device suspected of being built on Apple’s technology. Alongside it, Apple wants expedited discovery — legal shorthand for arguing that the standard schedule moves too slowly while something is actively underway.
Firms rarely push to accelerate discovery unless they expect the search to turn something up. Combine that with the eleven fresh names and the filing reads less like a fishing expedition and more like a company that thinks it has new proof of wrongdoing.
The two engineers already named
Apple’s earlier accusations targeted Chang Liu, a former senior system electrical engineer, and Tang Yew Tan, a former VP, alleging both passed trade secrets to OpenAI. They are still at the heart of the case.
What the new filing does is place additional figures around them. According to Apple, one former employee met with Chang Liu before interviewing at OpenAI “and discussed with them during that meeting Apple proprietary information relating to unannounced products.”
A second claim gets into the mechanics. The filing asserts that “yet another former Apple employee took screenshots of confidential Apple documents relating to an unannounced Apple Product before an interview at OpenAI.”
The detail about the work devices
And then comes the passage that is toughest to wave away. In the filing, Apple states that “multiple former Apple employees now working at OpenAI reached out to discuss returning Apple-issued work devices they kept when they left Apple.”
It’s worth a second pass. Individuals who had already departed Apple, and were already employed at OpenAI, were still holding Apple hardware — and they were the ones who raised it. Whether you read that as evidence of theft or as evidence of a careless offboarding process depends on whose side of the table you’re sitting.
OpenAI’s answer, filed the day before
OpenAI beat Apple to the punch by 24 hours with its own response. The company argued that Apple’s preliminary injunction request is “both based on false information and completely unnecessary because we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets.”
It went further, publishing text messages involving Chang Liu that appear to show Apple staff getting in touch with him after his departure to ask where certain files had been stored. OpenAI framed that as a case of Apple “failing to properly manage system access when people leave.”
It’s a pointed rebuttal, and it targets the same soft spot as the work-device revelation. If Apple’s own employees were messaging a departed engineer to locate files, the question of who actually lost control of what becomes considerably murkier. OpenAI has yet to answer the latest filing or its expedited discovery request.
Why a smart speaker is sitting under all of this
Apple’s injunction request isn’t using the word “device” in the abstract. Reports have circulated for some time that OpenAI is building an AI-enabled smart speaker together with former Apple design luminary Jony Ives, whose startup io Products OpenAI recently acquired for $6.5 billion.
io Products appears in the case as a co-defendant. The injunction Apple wants, then, wouldn’t merely block some theoretical product — it would fall directly on the hardware program that Apple’s own former design chief is attached to, at a company that just paid $6.5 billion to recruit him.
The ruling on expedited discovery is the thing to track first. Should a judge sign off, Apple gains accelerated access to OpenAI’s internal materials, and those 11 unnamed ex-employees shift from being a figure in a court document to being depositions.