Updated Oct. 26, 2026, 1:13 a.m. ET: Adds Judge Edward Davila’s Oct. 13 order granting Apple part of its request for expedited discovery.
An Apple engineer who left for OpenAI didn’t just download a confidential circuit schematic, Apple now says, but used it in his work at the AI company. The claim came in a court filing Monday in which Apple also accused OpenAI of letting evidence slip away and asked a federal judge to speed up fact-finding in its trade secrets suit.
The engineer, Chang Liu, spent eight years at Apple and joined OpenAI in January. Apple’s original complaint, filed in July, said he kept an Apple-issued MacBook and used an authentication bug to reach Apple’s shared network folders for weeks after he left. “LOL,” he wrote to a then-Apple colleague, Yu-Ting “Alyssa” Peng, in a message quoted in the suit. “I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny,” Ars Technica reported.
What Apple says the laptop showed
The new brief centers on that MacBook. Apple said OpenAI held it from the start of the lawsuit without inspecting it and only handed it over on Aug. 21, The Verge reported. A first forensic pass found that Liu “not only downloaded a confidential Apple circuit schematic but also used it in his work at OpenAI,” according to the filing, and that he and others at OpenAI were “well-aware” of his continued access to Apple’s third-party cloud storage.
Reuters reported that the schematic was for a power converter circuit and that Apple alleges Liu trained an AI agent using proprietary Apple information in March. An expert declaration filed with the brief explains why that matters: a schematic file in the LTspice simulation format is plain text, so “an AI system can ingest it directly and parse the complete design,” and LTspice can be set to delete the companion files that would show how a design was used.
Apple also said the laptop held messages in which Liu discussed “the need to ‘restore’ and then ‘start using’ Apple-owned devices” after learning of Apple’s internal investigation in June. According to Bloomberg, Apple’s lawyers wrote that Liu “sent instructions for destroying evidence to an OpenAI colleague who confirmed she would comply.” “Important forensic artifacts on which forensic inspections rely — such as logs, metadata, and usage records—are transient and at risk of being lost, overwritten, or destroyed,” the filing said.
OpenAI’s response
OpenAI, which has asked the court to dismiss the case and says it is building products that are “entirely new,” argued in its own filing that “this dispute is a mess of Apple’s own making” and blamed Apple’s employee exit process. “There is no evidence that Liu accessed any Apple information through improper means or for any improper purpose,” OpenAI said, adding that “Liu has no use for Apple confidential information.”
The suit also names OpenAI’s chief hardware officer, Tang Yew Tan, a 24-year Apple veteran whom Apple accuses of using internal project code names in job interviews and asking candidates to bring parts for “show and tell” sessions. Liu is one of more than 400 former Apple employees now at OpenAI.
Oct. 13 ruling: Judge Edward Davila granted part of Apple’s request. Apple can obtain forensic images OpenAI has already collected, the materials OpenAI used to interview Apple candidates for its consumer hardware group, and LINE messages between Liu and Peng since January, and it can depose Liu, Peng and Tan, 9to5Mac reported. The judge declined to weigh the competing forensic experts’ findings on deletion, but called Apple’s argument about transient forensic artifacts “well-taken.” He refused to fast-track Apple’s access to OpenAI’s research on metal finishes, power management and batteries, and put off requests built on the term “Apple Originated Information,” which he called “amorphous as currently defined,” TechCrunch reported.
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