Apple has asked a court to put OpenAI on a short leash. In a filing this week, the iPhone maker sought a preliminary injunction that would bar OpenAI and two former Apple employees from touching what it says are its trade secrets, escalating a lawsuit that already had the two companies at each other’s throats.

The request would stop the defendants from accessing, acquiring, using, or disclosing the confidential information Apple claims was taken. Apple also asked for expedited discovery and depositions from OpenAI and io Products, the hardware arm built around Jony Ive.

The injunction sits inside a trade-secrets case Apple filed in July, which accuses OpenAI of lifting hardware secrets to speed its push into consumer devices. Apple’s original complaint alleged that departing staff brought prototypes to ‘show and tell’ job interviews.

The filing names names. It points to Chang Liu, a former senior electrical engineer, and Tang Yew Tan, a former vice-president of product design for the iPhone and Apple Watch, among the ex-Apple staff now at OpenAI.

OpenAI rejects the premise flatly. ‘Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction is both based on false information and completely unnecessary because we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets,’ the company said.

The fight is really about hardware. OpenAI has been building a family of devices with Ive, including a screen-free speaker designed to feel alive, and Apple’s suit lands squarely on that ambition.

The case is already leaving marks. Apple’s lawsuit has been disrupting OpenAI’s hardware plans well before any verdict, casting a shadow over a product line and a possible listing.

A preliminary injunction, if granted, would be an early and serious win for Apple. It would constrain the defendants for the length of the case rather than after a trial years away, and even the threat of one raises the stakes for OpenAI’s hardware timeline.

The people at the centre of the dispute are not strangers to Apple. Jony Ive designed the products that made the company, and his move to build hardware with OpenAI turned a former collaborator into a competitor overnight.

The bar is high, though. To secure one, Apple must convince the judge it is likely to win and that it faces irreparable harm, a tougher test than simply filing a complaint.

The two companies were once partners and are now anything but. OpenAI has spent the year tangling in court with rivals, and Apple coming for OpenAI is one front in a widening set of legal fights across the industry.

For Apple, the suit is partly defensive. It has watched former staff and its former design chief regroup at a company now building the kind of ambient hardware Apple has long guarded, and litigation is one way to slow that down.

The court will now weigh the injunction request and the call for fast-tracked discovery. Depositions of OpenAI and io Products representatives, if granted, could force detail into the open sooner than either side’s lawyers would like.

The case also lands at an awkward moment for OpenAI, which is trying to turn itself into a hardware company at the same time as it fends off a founder-turned-rival and courts public markets. A gag on what its engineers can build with is not the headline it wanted.

Trade-secret fights usually turn on specifics: what exactly was taken, whether it was genuinely secret, and whether the new employer used it. Apple’s call for fast discovery is an attempt to pin those questions down before OpenAI’s hardware ships.

Whatever the judge decides, the filing hardens a rivalry that has curdled fast. Two companies that once shared a stage over Siri are now arguing, in federal court, over who owns the future of the device on your desk.

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