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Apple isn’t done. Two weeks after suing OpenAI over stolen trade secrets, the company is now going after dozens of the people who used to work for it.
According to the Financial Times, Apple has sent legal preservation letters to around 40 former employees who now work at OpenAI. The letters tell recipients to hold onto documents, messages, and communications that could be relevant to Apple’s lawsuit, and they ask each person to sit down with Apple’s legal team.
That group is roughly 10 percent of the more than 400 former Apple employees the company says now work at OpenAI.
What a preservation letter actually asks for
A preservation letter isn’t a lawsuit. It’s a formal notice telling someone to stop deleting anything that might matter to a legal case, emails, texts, files, calendar invites, all of it. Deleting something covered by one of these letters can turn into its own legal problem, separate from whatever the underlying case is about.
Apple and OpenAI both declined to comment on the letters when asked directly.
How this connects to the Tang Yew Tan and Chang Liu lawsuit
Apple’s original lawsuit, filed July 10 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, named OpenAI, io Products, and two former Apple employees, Tang Yew Tan and Chang Liu.
Tan spent 24 years at Apple, most recently as vice president of product design for the iPhone and Apple Watch, before becoming OpenAI’s chief hardware officer. Liu spent eight years at Apple as a senior systems electrical engineer.
Apple accused both men of pulling confidential hardware information out of the company and using it to help OpenAI build its own devices.
Why Apple is casting a wider net now
In that original filing, Apple called what it had already found the tip of the iceberg. The new letters suggest Apple believes the alleged misuse of its information stretches well past the two people it’s currently suing.
OpenAI has said it takes the claims seriously but has seen no evidence that the lawsuit actually holds up and that it has no interest in another company’s trade secrets.
The current situation is that Apple isn’t just fighting two former employees anymore. It’s telling dozens of people who left for one of its biggest rivals that their old work laptops and message threads might matter again.
