A federal judge has set 19 July 2027 at 9 a.m. as the trial date in Apple’s trade-secret lawsuit against OpenAI, its io Products hardware unit and two former Apple employees, fixing the end point of a case that will test how far confidential product knowledge can travel when engineers change employers. The case management order, issued on 28 October, lays out discovery, expert and pretrial deadlines running through June 2027, and requires lead lawyers to meet by 1 June to discuss settlement, a routine step that does not signal that either side expects a deal.
The road to trial
The schedule starts quickly. The exchange of electronically stored information is due on 2 November 2026, and the last day to amend pleadings or join parties is 30 November 2026. Substantial completion of document production follows on 5 February 2027, with a status conference on 11 March and fact discovery closing the next day, on 12 March.
Expert evidence then takes over the spring. Opening expert reports are due on 31 March 2027, rebuttal reports on 14 April, and expert discovery ends on 28 April. Daubert and dispositive motions, which can narrow or end parts of a case before trial, are due on 5 May, with oppositions on 19 May and replies on 26 May.
The final stretch is compressed into June. Lead counsel must meet by 1 June to discuss settlement, joint pretrial filings and narrowing contested issues, motions in limine are due on 3 June, and a hearing on the earlier motions is set for 10 June. A final pretrial conference follows on 24 June, leaving less than a month before trial opens.
What Apple alleges
Apple filed the lawsuit in July 2026, accusing former employees Chang Liu and Tang Yew Tan, along with OpenAI and io Products, of improperly accessing or using confidential information about its products and technologies to advance OpenAI’s consumer hardware work. The case sits in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, before Judge Edward Davila.
At the centre of the claim is recruitment and retention. Apple says information was drawn from its staff during interviews for OpenAI’s consumer hardware groups, and that material about unreleased devices, components, manufacturing processes and vendor relationships was at risk of feeding a rival hardware programme. Those allegations have not been proven, and the trial date decides nothing about them.
What OpenAI says
OpenAI disputes Apple’s account of its hiring and its handling of complaints. It has pointed to an email mix-up involving Apple’s lawyers, published an open letter defending its hires, and argued departing employees could retain Apple files unknowingly. Its defence has also questioned whether Apple adequately protected the information it describes as trade secrets.
OpenAI has also alleged an employee who left it and returned to Apple sent more than 100 files about an unreleased device to personal accounts, a claim Apple denies. After Judge Davila indicated an injunction was likely, OpenAI volunteered not to use Apple-identified material during the case and offered forensic drive images belonging to 14 former Apple employees for review.
Two early wins for Apple
Before the trial schedule was set, Apple won two rounds of expedited discovery, ahead of the normal timetable. An order on 13 October required the defendants to hand over forensic images already collected, materials used to guide interviews of Apple candidates, and messages between Liu and Yu-Ting Peng on the LINE app since 1 January 2026.
Further discovery followed once Apple narrowed its requests to former OpenAI hires. That later order covers devices, messaging accounts, AI tools, recruitment interviews and how OpenAI handled confidential Apple information, while broader device-inventory and internal-investigation requests were refused as too wide for early discovery. OpenAI is meanwhile facing legal pressure on several fronts, including a Texas lawsuit over ChatGPT safety.
Why It Matters
The date matters because it turns a fast-moving hiring dispute into a long, public test of the rules for AI hardware talent. Both companies are racing to build devices that put an assistant in the room rather than on a screen.
The engineers who know how those devices are designed, sourced and manufactured are among the most valuable people in that race. A verdict, or a settlement before it, could shape how aggressively labs recruit from rivals, and how openly they court staff still employed elsewhere.
It also matters for what happens before any verdict. The discovery already ordered reaches into forensic images, interview scripts and private messages, and the deadlines through March 2027 will force both sides to commit to their versions of events under oath.
Apple is meanwhile expanding AI across its own products, as seen in its creative apps gaining AI assistants, so the case will unfold while both companies keep shipping. Whatever the court eventually decides, the products at the heart of the dispute will not wait for it.
Background
Trade-secret cases rarely turn on a single document. They turn on what employees knew, what they were told to protect, and what a new employer did with that knowledge, questions this trial will not answer until July 2027.
Source: 9to5Mac report, AppleInsider report
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