What the judge granted
A federal judge has ordered OpenAI to hand Apple a defined set of its own hiring records, in the trade-secrets case Apple brought in July over engineers who left for OpenAI’s hardware team.
Judge Edward J. Davila of the US District Court for the Northern District of California granted part of Apple’s request for expedited discovery on Tuesday, in Apple Inc. v. Liu, No. 5:26-cv-07078.
TechCrunch, which reviewed the order, reports that Apple may now see OpenAI’s materials from interviews with former Apple employees who applied for consumer hardware and robotics roles — interview checklists, guides, instructions, manuals, scripts, technical presentations and records of interview discussions that referenced Apple technology or components.
Davila also allowed Apple access to private LINE messages between individuals named in the case, including Chang Liu and Alyssa Peng, and approved depositions of Liu, Peng and Tang Yew Tan, OpenAI’s chief hardware officer. By TechCrunch’s reading, OpenAI has five days to produce material it has already collected and 14 days for the rest.
Why he granted it
The reasoning is about evidence decaying, not about whether anything was taken.
Bloomberg Law quotes Davila saying there is “a valid risk that critical forensic evidence on the devices of engineers that OpenAI poached could be destroyed”, and that early discovery is warranted where secrets may become “so deeply entangled with OpenAI’s hardware products or other research and development efforts that the harm cannot be undone”. Apple had pointed to a conversation in which Liu and Peng discussed restoring Apple-owned devices.
What he refused
Davila turned down the broader half of the request. Apple had asked for expedited access to OpenAI research and development on metal finishes, power management and battery functionality for hardware products. He ruled those documents belong on an ordinary discovery timeline.
He did not reject Apple’s requests for “Apple Originated Information” so much as postpone them, calling the term “amorphous as currently defined” and warning that as drafted it could create an “extremely burdensome, and perhaps untenable task” for OpenAI. Apple can narrow the requests and come back.
The case underneath
Apple filed on 10 July 2026 under the Defend Trade Secrets Act. Its allegations, as TechCrunch describes them, are of a pattern rather than a single incident: that former employees used Apple laptops to download confidential material covering unannounced technologies, features and products, and that former Apple staff already at OpenAI coached colleagues still at Apple on what to bring to their interviews.
None of that has been decided. A discovery order settles who has to show what, and nothing else.
What to watch
The order landed one day before the parties were due in court on OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the case and on Apple’s bid for a preliminary injunction barring OpenAI and the named former employees from using the alleged secrets, according to Bloomberg Law.
That hearing is the one that matters. The discovery ruling decides what Apple gets to read. The injunction motion decides whether OpenAI’s hardware team can carry on building what it is building while the case runs.
