Apple Asks Court To Freeze OpenAI's Jony Ive AI Device

Apple has asked a court to temporarily halt OpenAI's development of its first AI hardware device, escalating a trade-secrets fight that already looms over both companies' 2026. The filing, presented as an emergency measure, seeks to freeze work on the OpenAI device until the underlying lawsuit is resolved — a move that could delay the debut of a product designed with Jony Ive.

What Apple is asking the court to do

According to court documents cited in the source report, Apple's request would pause the OpenAI AI-device work while litigation over alleged leaked confidential information continues. Apple has also widened the cast: beyond the two former employees originally named — an engineer and a hardware director — the company identifies eleven additional ex-Apple staff it believes may have been involved in the case.

The claims, as summarized in the source, revolve around internal Apple conversations and documents that Apple says reached OpenAI. One former employee, per Apple, received privileged information about unannounced products before her interview at Sam Altman's company. Another allegedly took screenshots of sensitive material tied to a device in development. Apple also flags a pattern it finds telling: after the initial lawsuit, several former employees now at OpenAI returned equipment they had kept from their Apple stint, which Apple reads as a signal of broader potential involvement.

OpenAI's response: "we don't have and don't want Apple's secrets"

OpenAI has pushed back hard. In a statement quoted by the source, the company calls Apple's petition "infundada" — unfounded — and rooted in errors, denying that it possesses or wants any of its rival's trade secrets. The source lists specific fact-of-record disputes OpenAI raises against Apple's account, including an email sent to the wrong recipient after a mix-up over surnames, and a claim that a conversation with OpenAI's general counsel described by Apple never happened.

OpenAI further asserts, per the source, that it was Apple's own employees who reached out to one of the accused former staffers for help sourcing information — not the reverse. OpenAI also says its former VP of product design made clear to his team they must never use confidential data from other companies.

These are competing accounts filed in an active case. Neither side's version is settled fact yet; what the source reports are the respective claims each has put on the record.

Why the Jony Ive device is the pressure point

The strategic weight of the injunction sits on one product: OpenAI's first AI device, described in the source as designed in collaboration with Jony Ive, the industrial designer behind the iPhone and iPad. If the court grants Apple's request, the source notes the launch could be delayed — a meaningful blow to OpenAI at a moment when it is pushing to move beyond chatbots into hardware.

Apple, for its part, is leaning on the returned-equipment pattern as circumstantial support that the leak extends further than the currently named individuals. Whether that inference holds up in court is the open question the judge now has to weigh.

The bigger year at OpenAI

The injunction bid lands in what has been, by any measure, a punishing year for OpenAI. A separate report published the same day describes an operationally reshaped company: it says OpenAI "spent months battling former co-founder Elon Musk in a sensational jury trial, was hit with a high-profile trade secrets lawsuit from Apple, and faced widespread scrutiny after an unreleased model hacked another AI company." That same report identifies a wave of April departures — Bill Peebles, former head of Sora; Kevin Weil, VP of the science arm; and Srinivas Narayanan, CTO of B2B applications — plus CMO Kate Rouch and Fidji Simo, CEO of AGI deployment, both citing medical reasons.

More recently, per that report, CRO Denise Dresser announced her departure after eight months, and longtime COO Brad Lightcap — most recently on "special projects" — was in the process of moving on. President and co-founder Greg Brockman, the same report argues, has quietly amassed operational control while Sam Altman remains CEO in title. Readers should treat those characterizations as one publication's reading of the company, not a filed fact — but the pattern of executive churn is a datum, and it is the backdrop against which Apple's injunction bid is being fought.

What to watch next

• The injunction ruling. A grant would freeze OpenAI's device work; a denial keeps the launch trajectory on schedule while the underlying case grinds on.
• The list of eleven additional former employees. Whether Apple names them formally, and whether any move to OpenAI is documented in court, would sharpen the "how far did the leak go" question.
• Any device-specific disclosures. Filings that quote internal Apple product documents, or descriptions of the OpenAI device design, would tell readers what is actually in dispute rather than what each PR team wants framed.

The wider point

The case is a reminder that trade-secret risk is now inseparable from AI-hardware ambition. When a former employer accuses a rival of building a competing device on the back of leaked knowledge, the fight is not just about a lawsuit — it is about who gets to ship the next physical form factor for AI, and on what timeline. Apple's move puts a specific product timeline at risk; OpenAI's response says the underlying claim is wrong on the facts. Either way, this is one of the year's clearer tests of how the industry polices the boundary between AI's talent flow and its intellectual property.