Odd Lots · Thursday, July 23, 2026
Apple has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that former executive Tang Tan, along with others, stole proprietary engineering information and prototypes to aid OpenAI's development of AI devices. The lawsuit also names an engineer, Chang Lu, accused of breaching Apple's servers. Mark Gurman describes Apple's complaint as "thin" regarding Tan's recruitment activities but "extremely serious" if the allegations against Lu are true.
“Two years ago, three years ago, Dude named tank Tan vice president of iPhone product Design, Apple Watch, product Design, AirPods, Acoustics, successories, all sorts of stuff. One of the most senior executives at Apple and by all accounts the number two under John Turnas and the hardware engineering organization comes to Turnus, comes to Apple it he says, I'm out of here. I'm going with startup. This is early December of twenty three.”
“They have four hundred former Apple employees in their hardware division at Open Air right now, My guess that's between five and eight percent of the total open employee pool is a former Apple employee. Kind of nuts, okay. Apple has been beside itself for two years about this, the hiring, the poaching, the fact that they're trying to compete with them using their best former people.”
“Reverse the beginning of this year, Apple finally had what they think is a smoking gun, an engineer named Changlu. He allegedly breaks into Apple servers and steals engineering presentations and such and gives them to Open AI. And so Apple begins building a big case against Changlu and Tang Tan, who they allege was bringing Apple employees into open A offices with prospective job offers and asking them to bring in Apple prototypes and other internal Apple equipment to give them a look at what's coming down the road.”