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Judge orders OpenAI to give Apple hiring documents in trade secrets lawsuit
IA en un minuto newsroom · Editor: Jon Elgezabal
In 30 seconds
OpenAI must hand Apple the material from its interviews with candidates who came from Apple, within 14 days, or five for anything already collected. Apple may also read the LINE chats of Chang Liu with Alyssa Peng and question both of them under oath, along with Tang Yew Tan. The judge leaves OpenAI's records on batteries and metal finishes for the ordinary phase and asks Apple to spell out what it means by Apple Originated Information.
Federal judge Edward Davila on Tuesday, October 13, ordered OpenAI and the other defendants to give Apple the records of their hiring interviews with people who came from Apple. The order, from the court for the Northern District of California in San Jose, grants Apple part of the early access to evidence it had sought in its trade secrets lawsuit.
Apple filed the suit on July 10 against two of its former employees who now work at OpenAI, Chang Liu and Tang Yew Tan, and against OpenAI and io Products. It claims the two accessed confidential Apple information and used it to push forward OpenAI's hardware development, and it also accuses the defendants of drawing information out of other Apple employees during recruiting interviews, as 9to5Mac explains.
The judge requires them to hand over the material OpenAI used to prepare or run its interviews of Apple candidates for its consumer hardware products group, which includes robotics: scripts, checklists and instructions, along with the technical presentations or other documents that sum up those interviews. The defendants must also turn over the forensic copies they had already made in connection with Apple's claims. The deadline is 14 days, or five for material they had already gathered for the case.
Apple will also be able to see the LINE conversations (LINE is a messaging app) that Chang Liu has had with Alyssa Peng since January 1, 2026. The judge lets Apple depose Liu, Peng and Tang Yew Tan, whom Infobae identifies as OpenAI's head of hardware, within 30 days of receiving all the responses. Apple may also question representatives of OpenAI and io Products, although for now the judge turns down its request to depose a fourth person.
On the other hand, he refuses fast-track access to OpenAI's research documents on metal finishes, power management and batteries for consumer hardware products, which will be dealt with in the ordinary discovery phase of the case. He also puts off ruling on every request that relies on what Apple calls "Apple Originated Information," finding that definition too imprecise. If Apple wants to keep those requests, it has to talk to the defendants and give the court a narrower definition within five days. The judge decided without a hearing and cancelled the one set for October 14.
Why it matters · analysis and opinion
The fight for AI hardware talent has reached the courts, and this order shows how far it can go. Hiring a rival's engineers is legal; what Apple disputes is whether the interviews were used to draw protected know-how out of them, and the judge lets it look at exactly those records earlier than usual. Nothing has been proven yet: this is a preliminary stage, and the most sensitive material, OpenAI's technical research, remains out of its reach for now. For any company hiring people from a competitor, the lesson is practical: technical interviews leave a trail and can end up before a judge, so it pays to set out in writing what is off limits and to keep a record that the candidate brings no information from their previous employer.
Source: CourtListener · Written with the help of AI: how we make the news
