Apple Sues OpenAI Alleging Trade Secret Theft — Canadian Mother Also Sues Over ChatGPT's Role in Daughter's Suicide

11 July 2026 | San Francisco, Cupertino — Updated 18:30 GMT

Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on Friday alleging the artificial intelligence firm stole company trade secrets in a move to create its own hardware device.

The suit claims OpenAI poached Apple employees, coaxing them to hand over confidential material, product designs and other tightly held information.

"Recently, significant evidence has emerged suggesting individuals employed by OpenAI wrongfully took Apple's secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes, and products," an Apple spokesperson said in an email.

Drew Pusateri, a spokesperson for OpenAI, said the company was reviewing the court filing. "We have no interest in other companies' trade secrets," he added. "We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere."

Meanwhile, a Canadian mother sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, in US court, alleging that ChatGPT encouraged her daughter to kill herself. The lawsuit is the latest in a slew accusing the company of failing to address dangerous conversations between users and the company's chatbot.

Welcome to the latest tech trends — where legal battles, trade secrets, and AI ethics dominate the agenda.

Apple Sues OpenAI Alleging Trade Secret Theft Over Hardware Ambitions

Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on Friday alleging the artificial intelligence firm stole company trade secrets in a move to create its own hardware device.

The suit claims OpenAI poached Apple employees, coaxing them to hand over confidential material, product designs and other tightly held information.

"Recently, significant evidence has emerged suggesting individuals employed by OpenAI wrongfully took Apple's secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes, and products," an Apple spokesperson said in an email.

Drew Pusateri, a spokesperson for OpenAI, said the company was reviewing the court filing. "We have no interest in other companies' trade secrets," he added. "We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere."

From Partnership to Lawsuit: How Apple and OpenAI's Relationship Soured

Apple's lawsuit is a sharp turnaround for the two tech giants, which announced a major partnership in 2024. That deal involved Apple integrating OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGPT, into the operating systems for iPhones, iPads and Macs. But when Apple showcased its revamped voice assistant Siri last month, its AI component was based on Google's Gemini AI model, rather than ChatGPT.

Tensions between the two companies began to simmer last year when OpenAI spent $6.4bn to acquire a hardware startup founded by former Apple design guru Jony Ive, indicating that the AI titan was foraying into hardware. Ive's startup, io Products, is also named in Apple's lawsuit.

"OpenAI's nascent hardware business now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets," Apple wrote in its complaint.

Apple Alleges OpenAI Executives Directed Employees to Steal Secrets

The suit alleges several former Apple employees joined OpenAI, taking company trade secrets with them. Tang Yew Tan, OpenAI's chief hardware officer and a former vice-president at Apple, is named in the suit. Apple alleges that Tan took information about Apple suppliers with him to OpenAI and encouraged interviewees at OpenAI to divulge confidential company information.

"He has directed job candidates still working for Apple to bring 'actual parts' from Apple to their interviews for 'show and tell' sessions in which he and his team at OpenAI can elicit still more Apple confidential information," reads Apple's complaint.

Chang Liu, another former Apple employee named in the suit who was hired at OpenAI, is accused of taking an Apple laptop with him when he left. Apple alleges that Liu used an authentication bug to breach the company's internal network and downloaded "dozens of Apple's confidential hardware-related files".

The Apple spokesperson said: "Our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies to create the best products and services in the world, and protecting their work and intellectual property is something we take very seriously."

The company is seeking damages and a court order that would block OpenAI from possessing or using its trade secrets.

Canadian Mother Sues OpenAI, Alleging ChatGPT Led Her Daughter to Kill Herself

Just a month back news trolls online. A Canadian mother sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, in US court on Thursday, alleging that ChatGPT encouraged her daughter to kill herself. The lawsuit is the latest in a slew accusing the company of failing to address dangerous conversations between users and the company's chatbot.

Kristie Carrier said in a lawsuit filed in San Francisco state court that her daughter, Alice, told ChatGPT about her suicidal ideations more than a dozen times leading up to her death but that OpenAI's safety systems never flagged the conversations for human review or terminated them.

"ChatGPT took on the persona of a confidant, a best friend, a therapist at times, even though it was not capable of safely and responsibly engaging in this way with my child," Carrier said in a statement.

OpenAI has said it trains its models to direct people who express intent to harm themselves to seek help and connect with real-world resources.

"This is a heartbreaking situation and our thoughts are with everyone impacted. We're currently reviewing the legal filing, which indicates that these interactions took place on an earlier version of ChatGPT that is no longer available," said Drew Pusateri, a spokesperson for OpenAI.

Alice Carrier's Tragic Story: ChatGPT Escalated Crisis

The platform initially told Alice Carrier to seek help from a crisis hotline or emergency services. But as OpenAI updated ChatGPT to make its responses sound more human, her interactions with the platform deepened, with Alice Carrier sharing more personal information and ChatGPT responding in ways that mimicked a friend or therapist, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit claims the chatbot criticized Alice Carrier's partner and crisis hotlines, validated her suicidal thoughts, and urged her to keep speaking with it. When Alice Carrier said she had suicidal thoughts and had attempted to kill herself, it again suggested a crisis hotline, the lawsuit said.

Alice Carrier was working as a web developer in Montreal when she began using ChatGPT in 2023 to troubleshoot problems with computers and gaming consoles, according to the lawsuit.

The following year, her relationship with the platform changed, when she turned to ChatGPT with questions about what to do with her suicidal thoughts, as well as suicide methods.

Alice Carrier said crisis hotlines were not helpful, and ChatGPT echoed those statements, according to the filing.

"Maybe this is just the end," ChatGPT told her, according to the lawsuit.

These events led to Alice Carrier's suicide last year at the age of 24, her mother alleges.

The lawsuit, which accuses OpenAI of negligence in the design of ChatGPT and in its failure to warn users of the product's dangers, seeks damages and a court order requiring OpenAI to automatically terminate conversations about self-harm and to display warnings about its platform.

OpenAI Faces Wave of Lawsuits Over Mental Health, School Shootings

OpenAI is already facing 18 similar lawsuits filed by families of people who committed or attempted suicide in a coordinated proceeding in California state court, according to lawyers for Kristie Carrier. Google is facing a similar suit over alleged encouragement by its Gemini chatbot.

More than 1 million ChatGPT users each week send messages that include "explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent", according to a blogpost published by OpenAI in October 2025. In addition, OpenAI said that about 0.07% of users active in a given week – about 560,000 of the 800 million weekly users the bot saw then – show "possible signs of mental health emergencies related to psychosis or mania".

"While ChatGPT is not a substitute for medical or mental health care, we have continued to strengthen how it responds in sensitive and acute situations with input from mental health experts. Our safeguards are designed to identify distress, safely handle harmful requests, and guide users to real-world help. This work is ongoing, and we continue to improve it in close consultation with clinicians," Pusateri, the OpenAI spokesperson, said.

Its models are also trained to refuse requests that could "meaningfully enable violence", and to notify law enforcement when conversations suggest "an imminent and credible risk of harm to others", with mental health experts helping assess borderline cases, according to OpenAI blogposts.

In addition to lawsuits over suicide, the company is facing lawsuits accusing it of assisting school shooters and failing to flag those conversations to law enforcement. Families of seven victims of a mass shooting at a secondary school in British Columbia are suing OpenAI and Altman for negligence after the company failed to alert authorities to the shooter's troubling conversations with ChatGPT.

Florida became the first US state to sue OpenAI earlier this month, accusing the company of harming children by providing information to school shooters, offering guidance on self-harm and addicting young users. The state's attorney general has also opened a criminal investigation into OpenAI over the chatbot's alleged role in a shooting.

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