Apple’s lawyers don’t usually reach for words like “shocking” in a court filing. But that’s exactly the term they used this week, after getting their hands on a MacBook that once belonged to Chang Liu, the former Apple engineer at the center of the company’s trade secrets fight with OpenAI. A first pass at the forensics, Apple says, turned up enough to justify speeding the whole case up.
Quick recap, because this lawsuit has been moving fast. Apple sued OpenAI in July, claiming former staff walked off with confidential engineering material to help build OpenAI’s products. Weeks later it asked for a preliminary injunction and, separately, pushed hard for expedited discovery, wanting depositions and documents from OpenAI on an accelerated timeline. Apple made that same ask again just last week. OpenAI’s response, unsurprisingly, has been to ask the court to toss the case out entirely.
Liu is where the story gets specific. He spent years at Apple as a senior system electrical engineer, left for OpenAI in January, and now stands accused of exploiting a security flaw to pull confidential files on his way out the door. This week’s twist: his own attorneys handed Apple the MacBook he used after his departure, and the early forensic read is not flattering. Apple says Liu didn’t just download a confidential circuit schematic — he put it to work at OpenAI. Apple also claims Liu and at least one OpenAI colleague knew all along about his unauthorized access to Apple’s cloud storage. Then there’s the evidence-destruction claim: once Liu learned Apple was investigating him, he allegedly told a coworker how to wipe evidence, and she agreed to help. On top of all that, Apple says he used an OpenAI tool that happens to share its name with an internal Apple engineering app — a detail that reads almost too on-the-nose to be real.
The technical piece matters too. Apple alleges Liu ran a March simulation in LTspice using that same schematic, and that his messages from around then describe an AI “agent” learning to operate the tool and interpret its results. That’s the crux of Apple’s urgency: once a trade secret gets absorbed into a system that learns from it, you can’t easily claw that back. The exposure keeps compounding.
Apple also notes the defendants had a chance to inspect the laptop themselves and skipped it, instead building arguments the device’s own data reportedly contradicts. And there’s a wrinkle involving a Mac mini — Apple says the schematic’s use first surfaced there, then synced to the MacBook via iCloud, which is why Apple now wants that Mac mini too. In Apple’s words, this isn’t a fishing expedition; it’s evidence the company says speaks for itself, and it’s why Apple wants the court to move fast. You can read the full filing shared by 9to5Mac, here.
