Lawyers for Liu, the former Apple employee the company is suing over its trade secrets, handed his old work laptop to Apple for examination earlier this month. In a new court filing, Apple says the machine shows he used a confidential Apple schematic in his work at OpenAI, along with a tool whose name matches that of an internal Apple engineering application. The filing also claims that in June, on learning of Apple's investigation, Liu asked an OpenAI colleague, Yu-Ting Peng, to help destroy evidence. Apple says OpenAI was well aware of the access Liu had to its corporate data, and it is asking the court for a preliminary injunction that would bar OpenAI from developing hardware built on Apple technology while the case runs.
The laptop is doing double duty in Apple's argument. In the filing, the company says the device proves it is not hunting for evidence without specific cause — that the material confirms both the use of trade secrets and the destruction of evidence. It adds that the defendants have so far produced only a limited volume of information, and did so after weeks of delay.
None of the new evidence is public. What is public is from earlier filings: messages in which Liu used a laughing-crying emoji and showed he understood he still had access to Apple files.
That access is the pivot the whole dispute turns on. OpenAI has defended Liu by saying that after leaving Apple he went back to its files only to help former colleagues who asked him to. In an earlier statement, OpenAI said Apple was trying to shift responsibility onto residual access, and would not acknowledge that the problem usually arises because Apple mismanages system access after employees depart. Apple's answer is that Liu kept his access by exploiting a rare and previously unknown authentication bug. TechCrunch has asked OpenAI for comment on the new allegations.
Those two accounts describe the same logs and produce opposite companies. In OpenAI's version, Apple left a door open and is now suing the person who walked through it. In Apple's, there was no open door — there was a flaw nobody knew about, which someone had to find and use. The authentication-bug claim is what converts a story about Apple's own offboarding hygiene into a story about intent, and it is worth noticing how much weight one unverified technical assertion is being asked to carry. The evidence behind it is sealed, so what is on the record is not the evidence but Apple's characterisation of it.
Apple is also seeking expedited discovery, tied to its suspicion that other former employees may be involved. Its original complaint noted that more than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI.
That 400 is framing, not proof. It is the number you put in a complaint when you want a judge to read a single engineer's conduct as a pattern rather than an incident — and it is also, on its own, an unremarkable fact about two large companies in the same city hiring from the same pool. But it explains the expedited-discovery request: Apple wants to look further than one laptop, and it needs a reason for the court to let it.
The more interesting question is what Apple is actually asking for. The remedy on the table is not damages. It is an injunction that would freeze a competitor's hardware program for the duration of litigation, on a trade secret theory whose supporting material the public cannot see. Evidence-destruction allegations serve that goal well: courts treat spoliation as a conduct problem, and conduct problems move faster than technical ones. Whether or not Apple can prove that a schematic reached an OpenAI device, an allegation that someone tried to erase it is the kind of thing that gets a hardware program paused.
If the court grants the expedited discovery, the case stops being about one engineer's laptop. It becomes a test of how much of a rival's internal record a hardware incumbent can pry open by pointing at its own exit door.