Discovery reportedly reaches well past the two named defendants, as Apple seeks an injunction on any use of its confidential information in OpenAI hardware.
Apple's legal hold notices instruct about 40 former staff now at OpenAI to hold onto files, texts, emails and other exchanges that could bear on the case, according to the Financial Times.
Apple reportedly believes the alleged misuse of its confidential information could involve more people than the executives named in its original complaint. That filing states that more than 400 people who once worked at Apple are now employed by OpenAI.
The suit was filed earlier this month in federal court in the Northern District of California. It claims OpenAI ran a deliberate campaign to hire away important Apple engineers while obtaining proprietary hardware blueprints, manufacturing methods and internal product-development information, and alleges that Tang Tan, OpenAI's chief hardware officer, and Chang Liu, a former senior electrical engineer, kept confidential Apple material without authorisation after leaving. Tan and Liu are the only individuals named as defendants.
Apple is asking the court to bar OpenAI from applying any of its confidential information to future hardware work, and is seeking monetary damages. It has also brought separate individual claims against Tan and Liu over alleged breaches of their employment contracts.
OpenAI has rejected the allegations, saying it sees nothing supporting the merit of the complaint. In a separate statement, the company said it has no interest in rivals' proprietary information and that its focus remains on developing technology that benefits people worldwide.
The litigation could substantially set back or even scuttle OpenAI's first consumer hardware product before release. Separate reporting on the company's device plans says it intends to unveil a speaker this year for a 2027 release, though that timeline could shift depending on how the case proceeds.
Stanford Law School professor Mark Lemley told Reuters that Apple's filing could grow into something very big, while noting that parts of what Apple describes — OpenAI's hiring of hundreds of former Apple staff among them — are not illegal under California law, which permits employees to move to a competitor. The genuine problem for OpenAI, he said, would arise if employees really did leave with confidential documents and the company is making use of them.