OpenAI has stopped answering Apple's trade secrets lawsuit in one-line statements. On Monday, the company published a public letter titled "Apple is getting this wrong," posted within hours of Apple walking into a California federal court to ask for a preliminary injunction against OpenAI and two former Apple employees now on its payroll.

The tone was not lawyerly. It was personal.The letter's central argument is that Apple's timeline does not survive contact with the paperwork. OpenAI says Apple's outside counsel at Weil, Gotshal & Manges emailed the wrong person in February after confusing two similar Asian last names, then claimed a phone conversation with OpenAI general counsel Che Chang that never happened. Apple, according to the letter, later conceded both points, said it was resolving any issues, went silent for five months, and then sued.Apple's Monday filing asks the judge to bar OpenAI, former Apple product design VP Tang Yew Tan and former senior systems electrical engineer Chang Liu from accessing, acquiring, using or disclosing its confidential information while the case runs. A parallel motion seeks expedited discovery, including documents on how the defendants allegedly reached Apple's systems, plus depositions of Tan, Liu, OpenAI employee Yu-Ting Peng and an unnamed OpenAI staffer who also came from Apple.

Corporate representatives of OpenAI and io Products, the Jony Ive-founded studio named as a defendant, are on the list too.

Apple wants a court order, OpenAI says the order is pointless

Apple told the court it faces irreparable harm without the injunction. OpenAI's reply was blunt: the request is unnecessary because it holds nothing of Apple's and wants nothing of Apple's. Apple's original 41-page complaint, filed on July 10 in the Northern District of California, was far less restrained, describing OpenAI's hardware business as rotten to its core and calling the documented conduct the tip of the iceberg.

It also noted that more than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI.

OpenAI published the Chang Liu messages Apple built its case around

The most unusual part of Monday's letter is the evidence attached to it. OpenAI posted redacted iMessages between Liu, whose last day at Apple was January 22, and his former colleagues. In them, Apple staff repeatedly ask Liu for help finding files, keep his iCloud account signed in on an Apple laptop to copy material across, and ping him weeks later for engineering context.

One thread ends with an Apple employee confirming he signed out and kept no copies.OpenAI's framing is that this is residual access, a housekeeping failure at Apple rather than theft, and that departing employees often retain reach into files they neither want nor know about. On Tan, who spent 24 years at Apple leading iPhone and Apple Watch product design, the company said he has been consistent internally that no outside confidential information may be used.

The hardware race underneath the legal fight

None of this is really about email etiquette. Apple and OpenAI signed a landmark partnership in 2024 to put ChatGPT inside Siri, then drifted apart, with Apple turning to Google's Gemini for its revamped assistant. OpenAI bought io for $6.4 billion and started building devices meant to make a phone optional. Greg Brockman told Joanna Stern on July 29 that OpenAI is plenty innovative, that it is working on a family of devices and its own chips, and that people should expect the first one soon.The letter is a persuasive document aimed at readers, not a judge. Whoever hears Apple's injunction motion will decide the actual question, which is whether OpenAI's first hardware product ships with a court order hanging over it.