Horizon Accord | Apple | OpenAI | Machine Learning
What Changed Was the Plaintiff
The Node
Tang Yew Tan spent twenty-four years at Apple, most recently as Vice President of Product Design for the iPhone and Apple Watch. He left in February 2024. With Jony Ive, Evans Hankey, and Scott Cannon — all Apple veterans — he co-founded the hardware design venture io Products. In May 2025, OpenAI acquired io Products for approximately $6.5 billion. Tan is now OpenAI's Chief Hardware Officer.
He is a named defendant in two separate federal trade secret actions, both in the Northern District of California, brought by two plaintiffs with no relationship to one another.
He did not arrive in either case at the outset. iyO's original June 2025 complaint was a trademark action; it named io Products, OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Jony Ive. Tan was added on March 13, 2026, when iyO amended to allege trade secret misappropriation. Apple named him on July 10, 2026. Four months separate the two filings that identify him.
Two clocks run through this story, and they measure different things. The convergence clock runs four months: the interval in which two unrelated plaintiffs, investigating independently, landed on the same executive. The reception clock runs thirteen months: the interval between iyO first alleging appropriation in June 2025 and the same underlying conduct becoming front-page news when Apple alleged it in July 2026.
The first clock is what makes this a pattern. The second is what makes it an accountability failure.
Neither is a claim that OpenAI is guilty of anything. Large companies are sued constantly, and a complaint is an allegation, not a finding. The narrower fact is the one that resists easy explanation: two plaintiffs, two investigations, two bodies of evidence, one name.
A single lawsuit is a dispute. Two lawsuits that converge on one name, describing the same method of extraction, are the beginning of a record.
What iyO Alleged
iyO, Inc. is a screenless audio-computing company spun out of Google X. Its founder, Dr. Jason Rugolo, holds a Ph.D. in applied physics from Harvard and spent six years at Google X before founding iyO in 2021. He demonstrated the iyO ONE at TED 2024 in Vancouver on April 17, 2024.
On June 9, 2025 — one month after OpenAI announced the io acquisition — iyO filed suit against io Products, OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Jony Ive in the Northern District of California, alleging trademark infringement under the Lanham Act. The case is IYO, Inc. v. IO Products, Inc., No. 3:25-cv-04861. Judge Trina L. Thompson granted a temporary restraining order later that month, and OpenAI removed all references to the io brand from its website.
Altman's public response to the suit was that it was silly, disappointing, and wrong.
In December 2025, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the restraining order. The panel found the marks differ by one letter and are pronounced identically, that the goods are related, and — significantly — that correspondence from io had itself described its product as competitive with iyO's.
In March 2026, iyO amended its complaint to add trade secret misappropriation claims under the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act and the California Uniform Trade Secrets Act, naming Tang Yew Tan as a defendant. The amended complaint alleges that a former iyO engineer, Dan Sargent, accessed internal folders, downloaded dozens of confidential CAD files, renamed them with meaningless character strings, exported the data into cross-platform formats, and provided them to Tan. iyO estimates in the filing that this accelerated io Products' development by nearly a decade.
On April 23, 2026, Judge Thompson granted iyO a preliminary injunction, finding the company likely to succeed on the merits of its trademark claim. In May 2026, iyO disclosed litigation funding from Omni Bridgeway, a publicly listed global litigation funder, to sustain the case against better-resourced defendants.
It took iyO ten months, an appellate affirmance, an amended complaint, a preliminary injunction, and an outside funder to move from being called silly to being taken seriously. The claim did not improve during that period. The company's capacity to survive the process did.
What Apple Alleges
On July 10, 2026, Apple filed suit in the Northern District of California against OpenAI, io Products, Tang Yew Tan, and Chang Liu — a former Apple senior systems electrical engineer who joined OpenAI in January 2026. Jony Ive is not named. Neither are Hankey or Cannon.
Apple's complaint alleges that Tan forwarded Apple supplier information to his personal email before departing; used Apple's internal project codenames during OpenAI's recruitment interviews to draw further detail from candidates still employed at Apple; directed those candidates to bring physical Apple components — batteries, logic boards, system-in-package chips — to interviews for hands-on demonstration; circulated an internal Apple managers' document describing exit-security procedures so that incoming hires could evade them; and advised recruits to conceal their destination so they could remain inside Apple longer.
The complaint further alleges that Liu retained an Apple-issued laptop after departing and used it to download confidential technical documentation, and that OpenAI approached Apple's contract manufacturers using proprietary information — including persuading one to perform a trade-secret metal-finishing process by falsely representing that Apple had authorized the request. Apple states that more than four hundred former Apple employees now work at OpenAI.
Apple says it wrote to OpenAI in February 2026 raising its concerns. According to the complaint, OpenAI never responded.
At every level, from members of its Technical Staff to its Chief Hardware Officer, and in coordination with business partners, OpenAI has been stealing Apple's trade secrets and confidential information.
This is the tip of the iceberg. Apple lacks visibility into what's been happening behind closed doors at OpenAI, where such misconduct is normalized and exemplified by leadership.
Apple Inc., federal complaint, N.D. Cal., July 10, 2026
Read that second paragraph again. Apple is not alleging that an employee behaved badly. Apple is alleging that the behavior is institutional — normalized, and modeled from the top. That is a claim about culture, not conduct. It is the structural claim, asserted in a filing governed by Rule 11, by a company with the resources to be believed.
OpenAI's response, through a spokesperson: the company has no interest in other companies' trade secrets, and remains focused on building technology that empowers people.
The Denial Architecture
In May 2025, following a demonstration meeting with iyO, OpenAI's Peter Welinder wrote internally that there was no fit — that iyO's device was orthogonal to OpenAI's and did not really work yet. The word choice was precise. Orthogonal means at right angles: independent, non-overlapping, unrelated.
That characterization could not survive contact with the record. Altman had told Rugolo, in the same period, that he was working on something competitive. The Ninth Circuit later found that io's own correspondence described its product as competitive with iyO's. A product cannot be simultaneously orthogonal and competitive. The two words are mutually exclusive by definition, and both were deployed by the same organization about the same relationship within weeks of each other.
Fourteen months later, the same grammatical form reappears: a categorical statement of disposition, offered in place of a response to specific factual allegations. No interest in other companies' trade secrets. This is a claim about what OpenAI wants. Apple's complaint is a claim about what named individuals allegedly did, on specific dates, with specific documents. A statement of disinterest does not engage a specification of conduct. It is designed not to.
There is a third recurrence, and it is the quietest. Apple wrote to OpenAI in February and received no reply. Rugolo wrote to Altman in March 2025 and received a same-day pass. When this publication put the findings of its June 2025 analysis to OpenAI for comment, no response was received by publication. Silence is not evidence of wrongdoing. But it is a consistent institutional posture toward inquiry, and it is available to any organization confident that inquiry will not survive contact with its scale.
The Asymmetry
Strip away the branding and the two complaints describe the same architecture. Proximity is established — a partnership discussion, a job interview, an acquisition. Access follows from proximity. Material moves: CAD files in one case, supplier lists and physical components in the other. The receiving entity then characterizes the relationship as having been unproductive, or unrelated, or nonexistent. And a product ships on a timeline that the record suggests it should not have been able to meet.
The difference between the two cases is not the conduct alleged. It is who was standing on the other end of it.
When a startup with a single product and a fundraising round in jeopardy made the claim, the CEO of the defendant company called it silly, disappointing, and wrong, and the story was covered as a naming squabble. When the most valuable hardware company on earth made a materially similar claim about the same executive, it led the technology news cycle within hours.
This is the accountability failure, and it is worth naming precisely. It is not that the system failed to catch OpenAI. iyO caught OpenAI. iyO caught OpenAI in June 2025, won a restraining order within weeks, and had that order affirmed by a federal appellate panel. The system worked. What failed was the reception — the willingness to treat a small plaintiff's specific, documented, ultimately vindicated allegation as anything other than noise until a large plaintiff repeated it.
There is a cost to that delay, and iyO paid it in the currency startups actually hold. The company told the court that io's launch jeopardized its fundraising. It needed outside litigation funding to stay in the fight. Thirteen months of being disbelieved is not a neutral interval for a company with one product and a burn rate. For most companies in that position, it would have been terminal — and the pattern would have gone undocumented, not because it wasn't there, but because the only witness ran out of money.
What the Record Cannot Tell Us
An acquisition is an efficient instrument for acquiring people, and people carry what they know. Whether the $6.5 billion purchase of io Products functioned in part as a mechanism for transferring knowledge that could not have been transferred directly is not established by either complaint, and this publication does not assert it. It is the question the discovery process in both cases is now positioned to answer, and it is the reason Apple's filing emphasizes that litigation gives it visibility into OpenAI's hardware operation that it does not currently have.
Jony Ive is not named as a defendant in Apple's suit. Neither are the other two Apple veterans who co-founded io. Apple's complaint does not accuse them of wrongdoing. Whether that reflects an absence of evidence, a strategic narrowing, or a judgment about which claims will survive a motion to dismiss is not knowable from the public filings.
Both cases are active. No court has found that OpenAI, io Products, Tang Yew Tan, or Chang Liu misappropriated anything. A preliminary injunction is a finding of likelihood, not of liability. Every allegation described above is an allegation.
None of which touches the pattern, because the pattern is not a claim about guilt. It is a claim about what happens to people who notice early. Rugolo noticed in June 2025 and was told he was being silly. He was right, and the fact that he was right took thirteen months and a federal appellate panel to become audible. The next builder who notices something will look at that timeline and make a calculation about whether it is worth it.
That calculation is the real theft. Not the CAD files. Not the supplier lists. The quiet arithmetic that teaches small builders to stay quiet — because the record shows that being right, on time, with receipts, is not enough. You also have to be large enough to be heard.
