Apple's Lawyers Emailed the Wrong Chang, and OpenAI Posted the Proof

On Monday night, OpenAI published a blog post called "Apple is getting this wrong," and it is not a normal corporate blog post. It is a pile of receipts: screenshots of iMessages, a full email chain between the two companies' lawyers, and timestamps, all posted publicly to undercut the trade secrets lawsuit Apple filed against it on July 10.

I read the whole thing this morning, plus Apple's original complaint. Here is what each side is actually saying, with the documents they are pointing at.

What Apple says happened

Apple sued OpenAI, its hardware arm io Products, and two individuals in federal court in the Northern District of California (case 5:26-cv-07078, per the complaint). The two individuals are Chang Liu, a senior system electrical engineer who spent eight years at Apple and left on January 22, 2026, and Tang Tan, who spent about 24 years at Apple, most recently as VP of product design for iPhone and Apple Watch, and is now OpenAI's chief hardware officer.

The complaint's core claims, per Ars Technica's and TechCrunch's reporting on the filing: Liu kept an Apple-owned laptop after leaving, discovered in early February that an authentication bug still let him into Apple's cloud network storage, and downloaded dozens of confidential files over several weeks, some of them expressly labeled confidential. Apple also says Liu coached a then-current Apple employee, Yu-Ting "Alyssa" Peng, on accessing files and how to "avoid trouble" with the security team before her own move to OpenAI. On Tan, Apple alleges he used secret project code names during OpenAI interviews, asked candidates to bring Apple components in for what the complaint describes as "show and tell" sessions, and used an internal Apple document as a checklist for evading exit security.

The complaint also notes, almost in passing, that more than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI.

On Monday, August 3, Apple escalated. It asked the judge for a preliminary injunction to bar Liu, Tan, and OpenAI from accessing, using, or disclosing the alleged confidential information while the case proceeds, plus expedited discovery. "Apple will be irreparably harmed absent a preliminary injunction," the company said in its filing, per Reuters.

A preliminary injunction, in plain words, is Apple asking the court to freeze everything now, before trial, because in its telling the damage keeps happening while the case crawls along.

What OpenAI posted back

Hours after the injunction motion, OpenAI's rebuttal went up. It calls the lawsuit "careless, aggressive and oddly personal," then tries to take apart three of Apple's claims with documents.

The first one is the wildest. Apple had claimed it contacted OpenAI about all of this back in February and got no response, and that its lawyers discussed the matter with OpenAI's general counsel. Per OpenAI's post, Apple has now conceded both points: the discussion with general counsel Che Chang never happened, and the February outreach went sideways because Apple's outside counsel, Gabriel Gross of Weil, Gotshal and Manges, emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names.

The email chain OpenAI published shows how that played out. On February 23, Gross emailed Chang a letter, then followed up minutes later thanking him "for your phone call just now." Chang wrote to Apple's in-house lawyers: "This guy from Weil claims to be representing you. For some reason, he is lying about speaking with me on the phone. I don't know who he is and we have never spoken."

The next day, Gross apologized: the phone call had been with a different person, a former Apple employee named Wang, and the follow-up email meant for Wang had accidentally gone to Chang. Apple's in-house counsel confirmed Weil was its counsel and called the episode a "miscommunication." Per OpenAI, Apple never raised the specific allegations in the lawsuit during that exchange, said it was "resolving any issues," and then went quiet for five months before filing suit.

The second document set is iMessages between Liu and his former Apple colleagues. Apple's suit paints Liu as secretly pulling files after his departure. The messages OpenAI published show Apple employees repeatedly asking Liu for help locating files and answering technical questions after he left, including one thread as late as March 5, per MacRumors' summary. In that March thread, one person on the Apple side wrote: "this is highly irregular, please remove me from this thread." OpenAI's argument is that ex-employees keeping access is a known Apple problem, caused by Apple not properly revoking system access when people leave, and that people trying to do the right thing end up still able to see Apple files without wanting to or even knowing it.

One honest caveat, and it is a factual one: The Verge points out this is a blog post, not a court filing, and describes the published messages as cherry-picked. Some of the same messages cut both ways. One exchange OpenAI posted shows an Apple employee AirDropping files out of Liu's Apple-linked iCloud folder the night he left, which is also exactly the kind of material Apple's complaint builds on. Both sides are pointing at overlapping stacks of messages and reading them opposite ways.

The third claim OpenAI pushes back on is Tan. Apple's complaint makes him the architect of the alleged scheme. OpenAI says Tan "has always been clear with the team that we do not want, and must not use, any confidential information from other companies," and notes he served Apple for more than 24 years.

OpenAI's bottom line, quoted from the post: "We do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets."

Where this actually stands

Nothing here is proven in either direction. The allegations are contested, the case is pending in the Northern District of California, and a hearing on Apple's injunction request is ahead, per MacRumors. Apple had not publicly responded to the blog post as of this morning.

And there is one more verified detail that makes the whole fight stranger. While all of this is happening, Apple and OpenAI are still business partners: ChatGPT is integrated into Apple Intelligence, per the Economic Times. OpenAI also paid $6.5 billion last year for io Products, the hardware startup founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive, per TechCrunch, and that hardware effort is the one Apple says was built partly on its secrets. Ive himself is not named in the lawsuit and is not accused of wrongdoing, per CNN's reporting on the complaint.

So as of this morning: two of the biggest companies in tech are suing each other and doing business with each other at the same time, and one of them just started publishing the other side's legal correspondence on its company blog. That is simply where the record stands.