Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI may not reach a courtroom for years. It is already doing damage.

When Apple sued OpenAI on Friday for stealing hardware trade secrets, the attention went to the lurid detail. There were “show and tell” interviews and an engineer who kept his work laptop.

One even texted a colleague: “LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage]”. The more consequential story is quieter. The suit itself, long before any verdict, threatens to slow the company working hardest to build a rival to the iPhone.

The damage starts now

That is the argument Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman laid out this week, and it is hard to dispute. A trade-secret fight forces new legal reviews, tighter internal controls, and hours of depositions and discovery that pull engineers away from building. Former Apple staff at OpenAI may go quiet about their old work, and managers may steer around whole lines of questioning.

The result is a slower, more cautious organisation, exactly when speed is the point.

There is a sharper risk too. If Apple proves OpenAI built its secrets into a product, a court could order a redesign. That would echo Apple’s settlement with the chip startup Rivos.

Bloomberg Intelligence expects Apple to win early, targeted relief that isolates disputed material and forces OpenAI to preserve evidence and certify compliance. None of that needs a jury.

A device on the line

The timing could hardly be worse for OpenAI. It still hopes to announce its first hardware product this year and ship it in 2027, with an iPhone rival as the eventual goal. That push runs through io, the design firm co-founded by Jony Ive.

OpenAI bought it in May 2025 for roughly $6.5bn, according to Apple’s complaint. OpenAI has the software: its latest models rank among the best around. What it has struggled to build is the hardware to put them in, and the lawsuit now shadows every design decision the team makes.

The talent machine Apple wants to stop

At the heart of it are people. More than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI, and the poaching did not stop when Apple’s investigation began. As recently as June, OpenAI hired Apple’s smart-glasses chief, Gurman reported.

Apple’s complaint describes a “checklist that Tang put together”, named for OpenAI hardware chief Tang Tan, to help new hires dodge Apple’s exit security. It also quotes a departing engineer’s colleague, Alyssa Peng, replying “I’m ready” when asked to help pull files. Months later, she left for OpenAI too.

Why Apple’s case is harder than it looks

Winning may be another matter. California does not enforce non-compete clauses, and it largely rejects the “inevitable disclosure” doctrine. So Apple cannot simply sue over the 400 departures, legal specialists told Business Insider. Every claim has to rest on conduct: retained devices, unauthorised access, coached evasion.

The real exposure, several noted, is the supply chain. Apple alleges OpenAI had a shared manufacturing partner carry out a proprietary metal-finishing technique, misleading it into believing Apple had agreed. No employee needed to carry anything out of the door.

An IPO under a cloud

All of this lands as OpenAI heads for the public markets. Its valuation has run from about $29bn in 2023 to $852bn by April 2026. It has raised more than $180bn and, in the complaint’s words, burns cash “at a historic pace”. The company already faces 42 state attorneys general and awkward questions after being leapfrogged by Anthropic.

Apple’s suit, rooted in a soured ChatGPT-Siri partnership, is one more cloud over the listing.

Apple, meanwhile, is pressing on with its own hardware roadmap and a fresh wave of AI wearables. OpenAI, for its part, says it has “no interest in other companies’ trade secrets”. But whether or not Apple ever proves its case, it may already have won the thing that matters most: time.

Every month OpenAI spends lawyering is a month it is not shipping the device meant to make the iPhone obsolete.