Apple filed a lawsuit Friday against OpenAI over allegations of trade secret theft and breach of contract.

The iPhone maker alleges that this misconduct, which it says reveals a pattern of theft from OpenAI employees who previously worked at Apple, was directed by OpenAI’s senior leadership, including Chief Hardware Officer Tang Tan.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accuses Tan of using Apple’s confidential project code names during OpenAI’s recruiting process, asking job candidates to bring in Apple hardware components to their interviews, coaching departing Apple employees on how to evade the company’s security procedures, and asking for details about the company’s unannounced products.

Before joining OpenAI, Tan had spent 24 years at Apple, most recently as VP of product design for the iPhone and Apple Watch.

The accusations come at a time when OpenAI is rumored to be developing its first hardware product, which would likely compete with the iPhone. In April, industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggested this device could be a smartphone that would rely on AI agents instead of apps. If true, it would be one of the largest threats to Apple’s core hardware business to date.

Apple’s former lead designer Jony Ive’s device startup io was acquired by OpenAI last year in a $6.5 billion deal to aid the AI company with its hardware ambitions. While io was named in the filing, Ive was not.

Tan is not the only OpenAI employee referenced in the new complaint. Apple also alleges that Chang Liu, who spent eight years at Apple as a senior systems electrical engineer, failed to return an Apple-issued laptop after leaving the company for OpenAI in 2026 and had used the computer to download confidential Apple technical documents.

Apple says in the complaint that the stolen documents included information about unannounced technologies, features, and products, including technical specifications, engineering presentations, and proprietary project data.

Liu is also accused in the lawsuit of sharing Apple’s confidential information with other Apple employees applying for jobs at OpenAI, advising at least one of them on what to study before their interview.

Apple sent a letter to OpenAI in February to raise its concerns, and received no response, the company said in the complaint.

It alleges that the behavior of these former employees is part of OpenAI’s strategy to extract Apple’s confidential information, which included asking Apple employees to bring designs and prototypes to their interviews, and answer questions about things like component and vendor selection processes.

Apple says its ongoing investigation revealed that OpenAI and its partners have even used Apple’s confidential information while the AI model maker develops its own hardware product. For instance, the filing references a proprietary metal finishing technique that was used by OpenAI after it allegedly misled a partner into believing it had Apple’s permission to do so.

Like many tech companies, Apple typically investigates potential trade secret theft or other improper activity by analyzing communications that took place on company-owned devices and reading through its server logs. By taking the case to court, Apple will have an opportunity to learn more about the extent of the alleged operation through the legal discovery process.

Apple is asking the court to bar OpenAI from using or disclosing its trade secrets, require the company to return any confidential Apple materials, and preserve evidence related to the case.

“This is the tip of the iceberg. Apple lacks visibility into what’s been happening behind closed doors at OpenAI, where such misconduct is normalized and exemplified by leadership,” the filing states. “As a natural result, OpenAI’s nascent hardware business now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets.”

In a prepared statement, Apple also said the following:

“At Apple, our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies to create the best products and services in the world, and protecting their work and intellectual property is something we take very seriously. Recently, significant evidence has emerged suggesting individuals employed by OpenAI wrongfully took Apple’s secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes, and products. We will always defend our teams’ hard work and innovations, and we are taking all appropriate steps to do so.”

OpenAI was asked for comment.

This story is developing and will be updated.

The computing community recently lost one of its enduring voices: IEEE Fellow Peter G. Neumann. The renowned computer scientist and respected risk analyst died on 17 May at the age of 93.

For almost 70 years, Neumann shaped the computing field through his pioneering work on risks, system dependability, security, and fault tolerance with rare intellectual depth and unwavering ethical clarity.

Five of those decades were spent as a principal scientist at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., where he worked until his death. A detailed narrative of his work, life, and mentoring is available on his SRI web page, where he chronicled his journey.

He possessed a rare ability to identify systemic vulnerabilities long before they became widely recognized. He cautioned that interconnected systems, if poorly designed or insufficiently scrutinized, could fail and become targets for exploitation. He insisted innovation always must be accompanied by responsibility, reliability, and a clear understanding of the risks involved.

With the widespread adoption of computing, information technology, artificial intelligence, and autonomous systems, Neumann’s insights have become more relevant.

Neumann was born on 21 September 1932 in New York City. After graduating from high school, he pursued a degree in mathematics at Harvard, where he had a conversation that shaped his approach to research, according to the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In November 1952 he had a two-hour breakfast meeting with Albert Einstein, at which they discussed the importance of simplicity in design.

Neumann was among the first generation of Harvard students to program computers and, remarkably for that era, enjoyed exclusive access to the computing systems.

After earning his bachelor’s degree in 1954, he continued his education at Harvard, earning a master’s degree in 1955. In 1958 he moved to Germany to become a doctoral student at the Technical University of Darmstadt as part of the Fulbright program, which provides funding for U.S. citizens to study or teach abroad. He earned his doctorate in 1960.

After returning to the United States, he joined Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., where he worked on error-correcting codes and survivable communications. He also pursued a second Ph.D. in applied mathematics and science at Harvard, achieving that goal in 1961.

Four years later, he was assigned to work on Multics, which became an influential operating system that shaped modern secure computing architectures. Multics was a mainframe time-sharing system designed to serve the diverse needs of multiple users simultaneously. Neumann designed its filing system, which featured hierarchical directories, access control lists, and dynamically paged virtual memory segments. He also played a key role in the design of its input/output system.

In 1970 he left Bell Labs to join SRI.

Technical contributions at SRI

Neumann made several seminal and foundational technical contributions while at SRI, including the following:

• Provably Secure Operating System. The PSOS project he worked on advanced formal methods in operating systems and computer security. The project demonstrated that security could be designed within the initial plan rather than retrofitted.
• Election integrity and voting systems. He outlined vulnerabilities in electronic systems and advocated for transparency, verifiability, and public accountability.
• Systems-level risk thinking. He broadened the concept of computer security to encompass human factors, governance, policy failures, social consequences, organizational negligence, and misuse of automation. His system-level perspective now fuels debates on AI governance and digital trust.
• Intrusion-detection systems. With his colleague Dorothy E. Denning, a security expert, he helped develop an intrusion-detection expert system (IDES), laying the groundwork for modern cyberdefenses.
• CHERI. He promoted hardware-assisted secure computing: technology that now influences next-generation processors. The Capability Hardware-Enhanced RISC Instructions (CHERI) architecture project, which Neumann led, is now being commercialized by an international, nonprofit alliance.

His contributions are united by a simple but profound principle: Security should be foundational, not incidental. Neumann argued that security must be embedded into system architecture from the start—not patched after deployment.

ACM’s Risks Forum

Neumann’s other enduring contribution was the creation and stewardship of the ACM Risks Forum, formally known as the Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems. For decades, it was one of the most respected online arenas for critical reflection on computing failures, vulnerabilities, security breaches, unintended consequences, and emerging technological threats. He transformed the forum into a scholarly archive of cautionary lessons in computing failures and risks.

In 1985 he started documenting how technological systems fail when complexity exceeds understanding and when society places blind trust in automation. He then moderated the community for 41 years, leaving his position in April, weeks before his passing.

In 1995 he published Computer-Related Risks, a book that serves as a case-driven guide to how computer systems fail and why. It is still relevant in an era defined by AI, growing cyberthreats, and our deep digital dependence.

Intellectual rigor with grace and humility

Neumann viewed computing not as an abstract technical pursuit but as a profoundly human enterprise carrying societal responsibilities. He was thoughtfully skeptical, questioned assumptions, and challenged complacency. His observations often anticipated challenges years before they became mainstream concerns.

He exemplified high scholarship ideals and was intellectually honest and ethically steadfast. He had been a frequent critic of lax attitudes the industry has maintained toward both computer security and individual digital privacy. He warned against the industry’s tendency to repeat mistakes.

Neumann’s signature contribution was not technical but a stance. He insisted, against industry custom, that recurring computer failures were not unfortunate accidents but rather were predictable consequences of how systems were built and sold.

He was fundamentally an optimist about what can be done with research and was a pessimist about corporations.

Security is not merely a technical patch, he said, but is a systemic property requiring sound design, governance, and human judgment. He consistently warned that uncontrolled complexity is itself a source of risk.

His signature contribution was not technical but a stance. He insisted, against industry custom, that recurring computer failures were not unfortunate accidents but rather were predictable consequences of how systems were built and sold.

Honors and recognitions

Neumann was honored with a number of honors including the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award, the Computing Research Association’s 2013 Distinguished Service Award, and ACM’s 2005 Special Interest Group on Security, Audit, and Control Outstanding Contributions Award.

In addition to being an IEEE Fellow, he was a Fellow of ACM, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and SRI. In 2012 he was inducted into the Cyber Security Hall of Fame.

An enduring legacy

Neumann’s greatest legacy is not necessarily his inventions but his way of thinking. His longtime interest was the risk ecology of computing—the business, technological, social, political, and personal risks that computing has created, along with its tremendous benefits in each of those spheres. He left us a timely lesson: Innovation must be accompanied by responsibility, foresight, and care.

Neumann was “one of the last of the old guard and a pointer to the future,” observed IEEE Life Fellow Whitfield Diffie, who helped invent public key cryptography. Highlighting both the significance and enduring relevance of Neumann’s work, a tribute by blogger Phoenix AMTD aptly said: “He spent 70 years cataloging how computers fail. We spent 70 years not listening. Maybe now we will.”

Let’s honor Peter G. Neumann not merely by remembering his advice but by following it.

A years-long lawsuit between the college-focused social app Fizz and rival Sidechat over unfair competition practices has taken an interesting turn. In a new filing, Fizz is accusing investor Jerry Lu of the venture capital firm Maveron of meeting with Fizz under the guise of exploring a potential investment, but then turning around and sharing Fizz’s non-public information with its rival, Sidechat.

The new allegations raise questions about the role venture capitalists play in competitive startup markets, as founders routinely share confidential business information while fundraising, trusting that investors won’t pass it along to competitors. Some VCs continue to request updates from startups they passed on, founders have said.

Both Fizz and Sidechat are in the same business: anonymous online forums and apps where college students can network and gossip. As a result, competition for students’ attention is fierce. However, not all universities see the apps as providing value to their students. The UNC system banned the apps from its campuses across North Carolina, citing the bullying and bad behavior that take place on these anonymous social platforms. On Fizz, for example, students can simply post an individual’s name, inviting peers to say whatever they want about that person.

Fizz originally sued Sidechat in 2023, alleging a range of abuses, including attempts to disrupt its launches at various college campuses, spreading false rumors about hackers accessing Fizz’s data, sending false spam reports to Instagram, and paying students to delete Fizz’s app.

The original complaint didn’t name Lu, as his involvement wasn’t known at the time.

Fizz says in its complaint that it only learned of Lu’s involvement through the legal discovery process, which revealed his role in obtaining and transmitting Fizz’s confidential information to Sidechat’s owner, Flower Ave Inc., which also acquired the Yik Yak app in 2023.

Fizz’s filing also alleges that Lu continued to act as a conduit, funneling information about Fizz’s fundraising efforts and other matters to Sidechat.

A screenshot of text attached to the filing shows Lu sharing notes with Flower after meeting with Fizz in March 2022, the complaint alleges. In that meeting, Fizz founders Teddy Solomon and Ashton Cofer shared non-public information about Fizz’s “business strategy, growth plans, campus-launch playbook, user metrics, ambassador program, fundraising efforts, and product roadmap,” the complaint states.

Lu went on to invest in Sidechat’s second seed round in October 2023, per Pitchbook data. However, Fizz claims Lu had been in discussions with Sidechat as early 2022.

Additionally, Fizz claims that Jack Burlinson, an acquaintance of both the founders and Lu, shared confidential information — including Fizz’s investor deck and its Fall Summary for investors — with Lu, who then passed it directly to Sidechat.

Requests for comment sent to Lu and Maveron were not returned. Fizz declined to comment.

Kyle Venn, CEO of the social media platforms Yik Yak and Sidechat, shared the following comment with TechCrunch via email:

“These are allegations, not court findings. We deny any wrongdoing and will address this through the legal process. The alleged events happened before the current Sidechat team acquired the business in 2025 and inherited the lawsuit. No one on today’s operating team was involved. We’re currently focused on making a great product, not suing other apps.”