Editorial Team
5 min read
Apple is seeking expedited discovery before a ruling on its preliminary-injunction request against OpenAI and former Apple hardware employees. The filing adds allegations involving other former employees, while OpenAI calls the case factually wrong; the court must decide whether Apple’s proposed evidence-gathering is justified and proportionate.
Apple is asking a Northern District of California court to allow expedited discovery in its trade-secrets case against OpenAI, its related entities and former Apple employees. The August 3 motion, filed August 4 seeks evidence before the court rules on Apple’s separate request for a preliminary injunction.
The immediate question is procedural but consequential. Apple, the iPhone maker that says it has spent decades developing the intellectual property at issue, wants early access to records and systems it says are controlled by the defendants. OpenAI, the AI-model company named as a defendant, says Apple’s account is based on false information and that it has no interest in Apple’s trade secrets. The court has not decided whose account is correct.
Apple says Chang Liu, an OpenAI senior systems engineer who had been an Apple hardware engineer, left Apple for OpenAI in January 2026. Apple alleges that, while working on hardware development at OpenAI, Liu exploited an authentication bug to download at least 37 sensitive technical documents from a third-party cloud repository. It also alleges he coached an Apple employee, Yu-Ting “Alyssa” Peng, on copying files without detection. Those are Apple’s allegations in the filing, not findings by the court.
Tang Yew Tan is more central to the hardware question. He is OpenAI’s chief hardware officer and, according to OpenAI, spent more than 24 years at Apple. Apple alleges Tan used internal Apple codenames and unreleased-product information in recruiting, while OpenAI says Tan instructed his team not to seek or use other companies’ confidential information in its public response.
Apple connects those accusations to work on batteries, metal-finishing processes and power-management specifications. The corporate defendants named in the case also include io, the device startup co-founded by former Apple design leader Jony Ive, which helps explain why Apple frames the dispute as a potential hardware-competition issue rather than only an employee-offboarding dispute.
The filing says Apple’s continuing investigation raised concerns about 11 additional former employees, beyond Liu, Tan and Peng. Apple cites an alleged discussion of unannounced products before Peng’s OpenAI interview, screenshots of confidential material taken before another interview, and contacts after the complaint about returning Apple-issued devices.
That increases the proposed discovery’s potential reach. It does not establish that any of those people retained, shared or used confidential information, nor that any Apple material reached an OpenAI product.
Apple’s filing proposes 7 interrogatories for corporate defendants, 6 for Tang Tan and 5 for Chang Liu. Source: CourtListener filing.
Apple proposes six document requests for each individual defendant and seven for the corporate defendants. It seeks, among other things:
It also seeks interrogatories and depositions of Liu, Tan, Peng, another former Apple employee and an OpenAI corporate representative. Apple says the initial recorded-deposition time would be capped at 20 hours total, with no individual deposition exceeding seven hours. But the filing says that limit would not apply to declarants the defendants rely on against the preliminary-injunction motion, potentially including Liu and Tan.
Apple calls the request tailored to information it says is uniquely in the defendants’ possession. It also asks the court to make the expedited discovery additional to, rather than counted against, ordinary discovery limits. That makes the ruling a test of both necessity and proportionality: evidence preservation and forensic access may be important to Apple’s theory, while the defendants can contest the burden and breadth before access is ordered.
OpenAI says Apple’s outside counsel initially emailed the wrong person after confusing similar surnames and mistakenly said they had spoken with OpenAI’s general counsel. The company says Apple did not raise the specific lawsuit allegations in that exchange, described the matter as being resolved, then did not follow up for five months.
OpenAI has also published messages involving Liu. It says they show former Apple colleagues asking him to locate files and answer questions for Apple work after he left, and characterizes the access as an offboarding-control problem rather than an effort to acquire material for OpenAI. The published material includes extensive redactions, so it does not independently settle what information Liu accessed, retained or shared.
OpenAI’s position is categorical: it says in the statement that the injunction request is based on false information and is unnecessary because it does not have, and does not want, Apple’s trade secrets. A contemporaneous report on the filing likewise describes Apple’s new assertions as an escalation in the dispute, not an adjudication of them.
Under the standard Apple cites, the court will weigh the pending injunction request, the breadth and purpose of the discovery, the defendants’ burden, and how far ahead of the usual schedule Apple is seeking it. A grant would permit early evidence-gathering; it would not decide whether anyone misappropriated a trade secret.
The most probative unanswered questions are forensic and organizational: what records remain on the relevant devices and accounts; whether Apple information was retained or moved; what recruiting and hardware-work communications show; and what controls OpenAI used to prevent outside confidential information entering its systems. The court’s first decision will be whether those questions justify the access Apple seeks before the merits are resolved.
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