Apple has sent legal document-preservation letters to roughly 40 former employees now working at OpenAI, ordering them to retain communications and documents, the Financial Times reported on July 17. The letters are not new lawsuits, but they are the scaffolding on which expanded litigation gets built.
The letters
Preservation notices instruct recipients to hold onto anything potentially relevant to a legal dispute. By sending them to about 40 ex-employees, Apple signals it believes evidence of alleged trade-secret misappropriation extends well beyond the handful of people it has already named in court.
An escalating case
The move builds on a lawsuit Apple filed around July 10 against OpenAI and io Products — the hardware venture tied to former Apple design chief Jony Ive. That complaint named ex-Apple executives Tang Tan, now OpenAI's chief hardware officer, and Chang Liu, accusing them of carrying confidential knowledge to a competitor.
The hardware subtext
The fight is really about devices. OpenAI has been building toward AI hardware, a push that accelerated with its $6.4 billion acquisition of io. Apple, whose entire moat is tightly integrated hardware, is treating that ambition — staffed increasingly by its own alumni — as an existential competitive threat rather than routine attrition.
The talent drain
Apple's complaint states that more than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI, a figure separate from the 40 who got letters. That number frames the case as less about two departing executives than about a systematic pipeline of talent — and, Apple alleges, know-how — flowing from Cupertino to its rival. Preservation letters usually precede either settlement talks or an expanded complaint naming more defendants; by casting a wider net now, Apple keeps the option to pull any of the 40 into the case later — a pointed warning shot at an industry that treats aggressive poaching as routine.