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Ever since OpenAI acquired a hardware startup co-founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive, the AI company has been ramping up its recruiting of people who work on Apple devices. It’s even tapping the iPhone maker’s supply chain network.

As OpenAI’s plans to make devices infused with its artificial intelligence get closer to reality, the company is increasingly plucking talent from Silicon Valley’s most successful device maker: Apple.

In recent months, the startup behind ChatGPT has been raiding the ranks of Apple’s design, manufacturing and supply chain teams, in addition to Apple’s team of AI researchers, according to ten current and former Apple employees and a review of LinkedIn profiles. OpenAI has also begun tapping the same supply chain network in China that Apple spent decades developing to help OpenAI with its efforts to make a new line of devices.

Luxshare, a major assembler of iPhones and AirPods in China, has already secured a contract to assemble at least one of OpenAI’s devices, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the matter. OpenAI has also approached Goertek, which assembles AirPods, HomePods and Apple Watches, to supply components such as speaker modules for OpenAI’s future products, the people said.

One of the products OpenAI has talked to suppliers about making resembles a smart speaker without a display, the people said. OpenAI has also considered building glasses, a digital voice recorder and a wearable pin, and is targeting late 2026 or early 2027 for the release of its first devices, one of the people said.

One reason for OpenAI’s success in poaching Apple staffers is the lucrative compensation packages it has dangled in front of them. But the company isn’t just using money to win them over. Tang Tan—OpenAI’s chief hardware officer, who previously spent 25 years at Apple working on design—has promised some of the people he is recruiting from Apple that they will encounter less bureaucracy and more collaboration at OpenAI than they do at their current employer, said one person familiar with Tang’s outreach to Apple employees.

To say OpenAI still has a lot to prove in hardware would be a dramatic understatement. A long line of companies—from powerhouses like Amazon to scrappy young startups—have tried unsuccessfully for years to challenge Apple’s dominance in hardware with products like the iPhone and iPad. And novel devices built from the ground up around AI so far haven’t sold well either.

“Just because you’ve built something at a big company with billions of dollars of resources and the top people in the world doesn’t make you more qualified to do it outside,” said Matt Rogers, a former Apple engineer who worked on the development of the iPod and iPhone before co-founding smart home startup Nest. “A lot of my former Apple colleagues went off to start their own things and almost all of them were total failures.”

One prominent example: Humane, which recruited a large number of Apple hardware and operations experts, to help the startup make a wearable, AI-powered pin. The product launched in 2024 to poor reviews. Earlier this year, HP acquired Humane for $116 million and discontinued sales of the product.

Still, OpenAI has shown it’s willing to make major bets on hardware—and tapping the expertise of people who helped make Apple the most successful device maker is a big part of them. In May, OpenAI announced it was acquiring io Products—a hardware startup co-founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive and Tan, and backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—for $6.5 billion.

And if AI is destined to become the defining feature of devices in the future, as some technologists predict, OpenAI could have a key advantage over Apple and others thanks to its leading position in the category. The stakes for Apple, which gets over 70% of its revenue from device sales, are huge.

“Our goal was, and is, to create a family of products that would revolutionize the way people interact with AI technology,” Tan stated in a court declaration filed in a lawsuit against io Products and OpenAI over trademark infringement.

OpenAI and Apple declined to comment.

Less Incrementalism

OpenAI’s hiring spree from Apple has kicked into a higher gear since OpenAI announced the io deal.

So far this year, OpenAI has recruited more than two dozen employees from Apple who worked on consumer hardware, up from around 10 employees last year and virtually none in 2023, according to an analysis of LinkedIn profiles. Those recruits include hardware engineers and designers who previously focused on user interfaces, wearables, cameras and audio engineering at Apple, among other areas, according to their LinkedIn profiles and people familiar with the matter.

Among the new hires is Cyrus Daniel Irani, who joined OpenAI in July after a nearly 15-year career at Apple. Irani, most recently a director on Apple’s human interface design team, worked with Ive on projects such as the multicolored waveform that animated Siri’s voice response beginning with the iPhone 6S in 2015, according to a review of patent filings.

Other recent recruits to Tan’s team include Matt Theobald, a nearly 17-year Apple veteran working on manufacturing design, and Erik de Jong, a high-up on the Apple Watch hardware team, according to people familiar with their job moves (neither has updated their LinkedIn profile to indicate they work at OpenAI).

In some cases, OpenAI has successfully wooed Apple employees with offers that are significantly higher than their compensation at the iPhone maker, in large part because of OpenAI stock grants that can exceed $1 million, one person said.

OpenAI isn’t the only one initiating the recruiting. The news of the io deal also prompted an influx of Apple employees reaching out on their own to OpenAI about working there, according to one person familiar with the team’s recruiting.

A big part of the attraction of working at OpenAI for Apple staffers is the chance to reunite with Tan and Ive, according to former Apple employees.

A former head of product design for the iPhone and Apple Watch, Tan left Apple to co-found io last year. He previously reported to Apple’s head of hardware, John Ternus, and was widely respected within Apple for helping take the designs dreamed up by Ive’s team and transforming them into products that the company could manufacture at scale.

In some cases, Tan doesn’t appear to have to twist the arms of his former Apple colleagues to get them to join OpenAI.

Some longtime Apple employees working on the company’s hardware products have become bored with the incremental changes in the type of products they’re working on and frustrated with bureaucracy at Apple, said people familiar with their thinking. It hasn’t helped that employees have seen their incomes suffer due to Apple’s lackluster stock over the past year, the people said. Tan has told people that his vision is to re-create how industrial designers and hardware teams used to work together more efficiently and on bolder products at Apple, said a person familiar with Tang’s poaching discussions.

Ive’s involvement with OpenAI, too, has enhanced the company’s credibility in the eyes of its recruits from Apple. The designer played a critical role in the resurrection of Apple under Steve Jobs in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

His stature was sufficient that he was able to negotiate an agreement with OpenAI that allows him to continue to be involved with his own design firm, LoveFrom. The firm will continue to do work for various clients, which in the past have included everyone from Ferrari to Airbnb. LoveFrom, too, has poached talent from Apple, but the firm is relatively small and has mostly focused on hiring designers, not experts in hardware engineering, manufacturing and supply chain, The Information previously reported.

In recent months, OpenAI’s devices project seems to be consuming more of Ive’s time. He is often seen visiting the company’s San Francisco office, according to a person who has witnessed the visits.

OpenAI’s device ambitions and poaching from Apple could complicate the relationship between the two companies. Since 2024, the two companies have partnered to integrate OpenAI’s models into Apple’s voice assistant Siri and the image-generation app Image Playground. The two are currently discussing a deeper partnership through which OpenAI’s models would help power an overhauled Siri, said people familiar with the conversations.

OpenAI’s decision to rely on Chinese suppliers could also put the company in an awkward position. OpenAI’s policy teams have been openly critical of the Chinese Communist Party’s AI policies and called attention to alleged ties between China’s military and homegrown startups like Zhipu AI. Apple, in contrast, is extremely deferential in its rhetoric and actions related to China, a country that accounts for 16% of its revenues and where the majority of its products are manufactured.

There are some signs that Apple has become concerned about OpenAI’s recruiting of its employees. Last month, Apple abruptly canceled an offsite meeting it holds annually in China for some members of its U.S. and China manufacturing and supply chain teams, where senior managers typically review plans for future products with employees, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.

Its reason for ditching the meeting: Senior Apple leaders were concerned that the meeting would keep too many executives away from the company’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters for too long, at a time when they were needed to prevent further defections to OpenAI, said a person who was informed of the decision.