Apple has taken the artificial intelligence industry's most valuable startup to court, accusing OpenAI of building a coming line of AI devices on trade secrets the iPhone maker says were taken from its own laboratories.

The complaint, filed on July 10, 2026, alleges that OpenAI and a hardware partner improperly obtained and used proprietary details of Apple's work on on-device intelligence to develop a planned family of AI gadgets. The suit was reported the same day by CNN, Axios and Bloomberg, the latter citing people familiar with the matter.

The dispute arrives as the two companies race to move conversational AI out of the cloud and into physical products. Apple has spent more than a year weaving its own assistant, Apple Intelligence, into iPhones, Macs and other devices, while OpenAI has moved openly toward consumer hardware through a much-discussed partnership with the design firm led by former Apple executive Jony Ive.

Trade-secret claims of this kind are unusually difficult to litigate, turning on whether the accused technology was genuinely confidential and whether it moved through improper means. But the mere act of Apple, one of the world's most valuable companies, suing the maker of ChatGPT signals how fiercely the spoils of the AI-device era are now contested.

For OpenAI, the case lands at a sensitive moment as it broadens from software into hardware and courts the kind of mass-market audience that Apple has dominated for nearly two decades. How the courts weigh the allegations could shape not only this partnership but the broader rules of competition as Silicon Valley's largest players converge on the same devices.

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