Apple widens its OpenAI trade-secret case

Apple says 11 additional former employees now at OpenAI may have witnessed, acquired, used, or retained proprietary information, widening the hardware trade-secret fight beyond the three people central to its complaint. In an August 4 motion for expedited discovery, Apple alleges one former engineer downloaded at least 37 sensitive documents and asks to depose four people plus a corporate representative; OpenAI says it neither has nor wants Apple trade secrets and argues that Apple’s own access controls and employee requests explain some of the disputed file access. For hardware teams following OpenAI’s $6.5 billion Jony Ive device bet, the operator lesson is procedural: clean offboarding, access revocation, and documented provenance become product-critical when rivals recruit from the same small engineering pool.