Judge Gives Apple OpenAI's Files, Then Cancels the Hearing

Apple just got the best of both worlds — and OpenAI got neither. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Edward J. Davila granted Apple expedited discovery in its trade-secrets war with OpenAI, ordering the company to turn over forensic device images, internal hiring files and private LINE chats within days. Then, having settled the discovery fight on the papers, he cancelled the big October 14 hearing entirely.

Let us be clear about what this is and what it isn't. The ruling is procedural, not a verdict — Davila has decided precisely nothing about whether anyone actually stole anything, and he went out of his way to say so. But procedure is where lawsuits are won. Apple walked in asking for early access to its rival's files before the main event; it walked out with depositions of OpenAI's chief hardware officer and two former Apple engineers, deadlines measured in days rather than months, and a judge who plainly believes some of the evidence could vanish if everyone waits around. The showdown everyone had circled for Wednesday? Gone. Apple didn't need it.

Photo: Aerial view of Apple Park in Cupertino, California — the headquarters Apple says is defending its engineers' work. Credit: Daniel L. Lu, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

What Apple actually won on Tuesday

The order, issued October 13 in Apple Inc. v. Liu (N.D. Cal., No. 5:26-cv-07078 — we cross-checked the docket number against Bloomberg Law's and TechCrunch's reports before printing it), grants Apple's motion in part. Three buckets of material change hands on a fast clock: documents within 14 days, or within five days for anything the defendants have already collected.

Bucket one is the forensic gold. The defendants must produce every forensic image they have collected in connection with the subject matter of Apple's claims — including the device images at the centre of duelling expert declarations filed August 31 and September 11 by forensic analyst Andrew Crain. This is the stuff Apple says could disappear: logs, metadata, usage records. Davila credited Apple's argument that those artifacts are transient and at risk of loss, and he quoted the parties' own joint filing warning that the alleged secrets could become "so deeply entangled with OpenAI's hardware products or other research and development efforts that the harm cannot be undone."

Bucket two goes straight at how OpenAI hires. Apple gets every document used to guide or conduct interviews of Apple employees recruited for OpenAI's Consumer Hardware Products Group — checklists, guides, instructions, manuals, scripts — plus the "Technical Deep Dive" presentations that memorialised what those candidates said, including anything referencing Apple technology or parts. If Apple's core allegation is true — that job interviews doubled as intelligence-gathering operations — this is the paper trail that proves it.

Bucket three is the private chats. Chang Liu must hand over all of his conversations on the LINE messaging app with Yu-Ting "Alyssa" Peng going back to January 1, 2026, including the messages cited in Liu's own August 31 declaration. Two people, one chat app, nine months of history — now Apple's to read.

And then the depositions: Liu, Tan and Peng, all within 30 days of Apple receiving the documents, plus corporate-designee depositions of the OpenAI entities and io Products on the roles and responsibilities of the key players.

What the judge wouldn't give Apple

This was not a rout, and honest reporting means saying so. Davila denied expedited treatment for Apple's request covering OpenAI's research and development on metal finishes, power management and battery functionality — that waits for ordinary discovery, on the normal timeline. He also declined, for now, to let Apple depose a fourth individual, and he refused to rule that these early depositions sit outside the federal rules' deposition limits.

The sharpest rebuke was linguistic. Every request built on Apple's defined term "Apple Originated Information" got deferred, because Davila found the definition, in his words, "amorphous as currently defined" — a phrase judges do not reach for when they are impressed. Apple has five days to confer with the defendants and come back with something tighter, or those requests die.

So the scorecard: Apple gets the forensics, the hiring files, the chats and the witnesses it most wanted. It does not get a free pass into OpenAI's R&D labs, and it has homework due in five days. A partial win — but the partial part it won is the part that matters most.

The case that built to this moment

Apple filed this lawsuit on July 10, 2026, in the Northern District of California, and it has been escalating ever since. The defendants are OpenAI, io Products — the hardware startup co-founded with Jony Ive that OpenAI acquired in a deal reported at roughly $6.4–6.5 billion — and two former Apple employees: Chang Liu, a former senior systems electrical engineer, and Tang Yew Tan, who spent 24 years at Apple, most recently as vice president of product design for the iPhone and Apple Watch, before leaving in February 2024 for Ive's company. Tan is now OpenAI's chief hardware officer.

Apple's theory, stated bluntly in its complaint, is that "at every level, from members of its Technical Staff to its Chief Hardware Officer, and in coordination with business partners, OpenAI has been stealing Apple's trade secrets and confidential information." That is Apple's allegation — not a finding, and OpenAI denies all of it.

Photo: Jonathan Ive at Apple in 2011 — years before he founded io Products, the hardware startup (now part of OpenAI) that Apple has named as a defendant. Credit: IDharper, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The case landed before Judge Davila on July 23, after Apple declined to let the originally assigned magistrate judge keep it. Apple moved for a preliminary injunction on August 3, asking the court to bar the defendants from accessing, using, disclosing or soliciting its trade secrets while the case plays out, and sought expedited discovery the next day. OpenAI moved to dismiss. At a 40-minute status conference in San Jose on September 14, Davila set all three motions — injunction, discovery, dismissal — for a combined hearing on October 14, and told Apple's lead counsel to see how narrow the discovery requests could get.

Then October got ugly. On October 5, Apple accused the defendants of breaking the court's rules: using a filing meant only to object to new evidence as a vehicle for fresh arguments and new testimony, including an eight-paragraph declaration from Liu explaining why he wiped his iMac before returning it. Apple's filing called the Liu declaration "the most egregious overreach" and the whole thing an unauthorised sur-reply — nine pages where the rules allow five. OpenAI, for its part, had earlier accused Apple of sandbagging evidence of its own.

Show-and-tell and the thousand-page download

The allegations themselves remain the most startling part of this case, and they deserve to be stated precisely as allegations. Apple claims Tan turned OpenAI job interviews into what the complaint describes as "show and tell" sessions, directing candidates who still worked at Apple to bring actual physical parts — batteries, logic boards, system-in-package components — into interviews and to divulge details like subsystem and component selection, CAD and simulation tooling, and vendor relationships. One candidate was surprised enough to remark, in the complaint's telling, that he "didn't even know we could take those from the office."

Tan, Apple further alleges, possessed and distributed an internal Apple "Need to Know" document describing departure security protocols, sharing it with incoming OpenAI hires before they had even resigned — and warned new hires not to tell Apple they had taken OpenAI jobs, so they could linger inside as long as possible. As for Liu: Apple says he discovered after resigning in January 2026 that an authentication flaw still let him into Apple's network, and instead of reporting it, joked about it in messages ("LOL," "so funny"), kept an Apple-issued laptop he never returned, and downloaded dozens of confidential files — including, the complaint says, a compilation of technical files running to more than a thousand pages, with detailed manufacturing documentation for the complex circuit boards inside Apple hardware.

These are Apple's claims. They are unproven. But they explain why Davila found good cause for speed: the Ninth Circuit test weighs, among other things, whether a preliminary injunction is pending and whether evidence might be lost, and a thousand-page download sitting on a former employee's laptop is exactly the kind of thing that keeps judges up at night.

OpenAI's side of the story

OpenAI has denied everything from the start, and its denials have been consistent. "We have no interest in other companies' trade secrets," spokesperson Drew Pusateri told the Associated Press in July. "We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere." The company says it is still reviewing the case, has moved to dismiss it, and in that motion accused Apple of filing "a baseless and pretextual lawsuit to make up for its shortcomings in the market for talent and retaining its employees, and its failures to integrate AI."

On the forensics, the defence has its own expert story: while Apple's analyst concluded Liu used an Apple trade-secret file in March 2026 and told Peng in June to have Apple-issued devices restored and used more heavily, OpenAI's expert found no evidence Liu used the file in connection with any AI platform — and the defendants stress that Apple does not allege anything was actually deleted or restored. Davila recounted both positions without weighing them.

It is worth remembering, too, that OpenAI is no stranger to bruising legal fights this year — from publishers suing over training data to the embarrassing episode in which its own AI agents breached Australian government systems, which we covered when OpenAI apologised for the breach. The company that wants to ship a consumer hardware device — its own filings put the earliest possible date at the end of February 2027 — is litigating on multiple fronts at once.

Why the cancelled hearing matters more than a hearing would have

Here is the part most coverage will miss. A hearing is theatre; discovery is ammunition. By finding the motion "suitable for disposition without oral argument" — the local-rule phrase that let him rule on the papers — Davila denied both sides a stage and gave Apple the one thing that actually changes the trajectory of a trade-secrets case: early, compelled access to the other side's documents and witnesses, before memories fade and chat histories get "lost."

Consider what Apple now holds. Interview scripts and Technical Deep Dives from OpenAI's hardware hiring machine. Nine months of LINE messages between the two former Apple engineers at the centre of the case. Forensic images of the devices in dispute. Depositions, under oath, of the chief hardware officer, within 30 days of document production. If Apple's allegations are even half true, this material is devastating. If they are false — if, as OpenAI insists, this is a pretextual suit from a company losing the talent war — then early discovery is also the fastest way to prove that, and OpenAI's lawyers know it.

And the injunction motion itself is still pending. The October 14 date had been set for the injunction, discovery and dismissal motions together; Tuesday's order vacates the hearing and decides only the discovery piece, on the papers. What happens to the injunction arguments now — rescheduled, decided on briefs, or folded into something else — is genuinely unclear from the coverage so far, and anyone telling you they know is guessing. What is clear is that Apple will walk into whatever comes next holding evidence it did not have a week ago.

The deeper story here is the one Apple's own aggressive AI talent strategy keeps underlining: this is a war for people, fought with lawyers. Apple is simultaneously raiding rivals' AI teams and suing to stop its own people from leaving with what they know. Call it hypocrisy or self-defence; the market for AI hardware talent is brutal enough to make it both. But a federal judge has now decided that Apple's suspicions are specific enough, and the evidence fragile enough, to justify opening OpenAI's files early. That is not a ruling on the merits. It is, however, the kind of procedural win that decides merits later.

Sources: Unite.AI; Bloomberg Law; 9to5Mac; TechCrunch; court filings via CourtListener; Associated Press; Yahoo Tech; MacRumors.

Daniel Rao covers Big Tech, AI and the courtroom fights shaping both for TechPulse USA — the lawsuits, talent wars and power moves deciding who builds the future.

Apple v. OpenAI: your questions answered

What exactly did Judge Davila order OpenAI to hand over? Three buckets. Bucket one: every forensic image the defendants have already collected in connection with Apple’s claims — the duelling expert declarations (Andrew Crain for Apple, August 31; OpenAI’s expert, September 11) were the flashpoint. Bucket two: all interview checklists, guides, scripts, manuals and “Technical Deep Dive” presentations used in hiring Apple employees into OpenAI’s Consumer Hardware Products Group, including anything referencing Apple technology or parts. Bucket three: all LINE messages between Chang Liu and Yu-Ting “Alyssa” Peng going back to January 1, 2026. Apple also gets depositions of Liu, Tan and Peng within 30 days of receiving the documents, plus corporate-designee depositions of OpenAI and io Products.

What’s the deadline? Materials the defendants have already collected must be produced within five days of the October 13 order; everything else within fourteen days (reporting: 9to5Mac, Particle, Unite.AI). The depositions follow within 30 days of document production.

What did Apple NOT get? Expedited access to OpenAI’s research and development on metal finishes, power management and battery functionality — those go through ordinary discovery. Davila also declined, for now, to let Apple depose a fourth individual, and refused to rule that the permitted depositions sit outside the federal deposition limits.

What’s the “Apple Originated Information” fight? Davila found Apple’s defined term, in his words, “amorphous as currently defined,” and deferred every request built on it. Apple has five days to confer with the defendants and come back with a tighter definition, or those requests die.

Is the injunction motion dead too? No. The October 14 date had been set for the injunction, discovery and dismissal motions together; Tuesday’s order decides only the discovery piece, on the papers, and vacates the hearing. Whether the injunction arguments are rescheduled, decided on briefs, or folded into something else is genuinely unclear — anyone telling you they know is guessing. What’s clear is that Apple walks into whatever comes next holding evidence it didn’t have a week ago.

In a related front in Washington, the White House's mandatory AI-incident reporting directive has put the same labs under disclosure pressure. And in London, OpenAI and Anthropic have made Britain's kill-switch promises to Parliament.