If Apple deserves protection for its chips and sensors, so too do writers, researchers, and artists whose creations power the AI age.

Apple vs. Oppo: A Case of Trade Secrets Theft and Its Implications for AI Litigation

by ChatGPT-4o

Apple Inc. has filed a lawsuit against Chinese smartphone manufacturer Oppo, alleging theft of trade secrets through the poaching of a key engineer, Dr. Cheng Shi. The case, filed in the Northern District of California, has sparked renewed scrutiny over the ethics of knowledge transfer, cross-border R&D operations, and legal protections for proprietary technology in the global tech race. While it centers on smartwatch and sensor technologies, the case holds profound implications for how courts should treat analogous claims of theft in the AI sector—especially those made by content and rights holders against generative AI companies.

Summary of the Apple-Oppo Case

Apple's lawsuit targets both Oppo and Innopeak (its U.S. research arm), as well as former Apple engineer Dr. Cheng Shi, who worked at Apple between January 2020 and June 2025. During his tenure, Shi held a senior position on the Apple Watch health sensor team, granting him direct access to confidential product roadmaps, design documentation, and silicon development efforts—including details about ECG and temperature sensors. He also had access to Apple's proprietary chip design initiatives, which are central to Apple’s broader strategy, including its development of custom AI chips.

Just days before his departure, Shi allegedly downloaded 63 confidential documents from Apple's shared drive onto a USB stick. His internet search history reportedly included queries like “how to wipe out macbook” and “Can somebody see if I’ve opened a file on a shared drive?”, further implicating him in deliberate data exfiltration. Apple contends that Shi also misrepresented his intentions upon resigning, claiming he was returning to China for family reasons while secretly coordinating with Oppo leadership and preparing to lead a new sensor R&D team at Oppo's Silicon Valley facility.

Evidence submitted includes Slack messages in which Shi admitted to gathering materials and scheduling numerous one-on-one meetings outside his purview in the weeks before resigning. Apple is now seeking an injunction to prevent the use of its trade secrets by Oppo, as well as damages.

Why This Matters: A Legal and Ethical Touchstone

This lawsuit exemplifies a core issue that transcends trade secrets in hardware: how to protect valuable intellectual capital when employees, algorithms, or software can extract and replicate proprietary knowledge across organizational or geographic boundaries. Apple’s legal strategy reflects a broader effort to create accountability for not just the individuals who misappropriate IP, but also the companies that benefit from it.

What makes this particularly resonant today is how the facts echo complaints from authors, journalists, publishers, artists, and media companies who claim that their copyrighted or proprietary content has been scraped, used without permission, and embedded into large language models (LLMs) by OpenAI, Meta, Google, and others. These AI developers often argue that because no single document is copied verbatim or attributable in its outputs, their use is "transformative" or "fair use." But Apple’s lawsuit suggests that courts are still prepared to recognize misappropriationeven when the stolen material is used as input to generate or enhance a new product, such as an AI chip or watch sensor.

Analogy with Generative AI Litigation

There is a powerful analogy to be made here:

• Apple argues that access to sensitive internal materials, even if not directly reproduced in a final product, confers an unfair advantage to competitors.

• Rights holders in the AI context argue that mass scraping of their content for training models does the same—allowing tech firms to build highly competitive, commercial AI systems without compensating the original creators.

• In both cases, the beneficiaries of the alleged theft (Oppo and AI developers) often argue the outputs are transformative, distinct, or public-benefit driven.

• Yet the law (in trade secrets and increasingly in copyright) recognizes that just because the final product is different does not mean the theft of inputs is irrelevant.

Just as Apple seeks an injunction to stop Oppo from benefitting from improperly obtained proprietary materials, authors and publishers are increasingly seeking injunctions to block the use of content-trained models or require licenses retroactively and going forward.

Moreover, the Apple case shows that courts are willing to treat “intentional concealment,” “unauthorized access,” and “pretextual departures” as signs of bad faith. The same could be said about how AI companies have operated under vague Terms of Service, scraping millions of copyrighted works without transparency or consent.

Conclusion: A Moral and Legal Imperative

Apple’s case against Oppo is not just a corporate feud—it sets a precedent for how legal systems can and should respond to knowledge misappropriation in the digital era. It reinforces the notion that stealing valuable intellectual material—whether hardware specs or copyrighted works—is unacceptable, even if the end product is different or "innovative."

Creators, publishers, and artists are not asking for anything radically different from what Apple is asking for: protection from exploitation, transparency, the right to control how their work is used, and fair compensationwhen their outputs are used to train or build someone else’s commercial tools.

Courts must therefore see through the arguments of “innovation exceptionalism” and recognize that the theft of trade secrets and the unauthorized use of copyrighted works in AI training stem from the same ethical and legal transgression: profiting from what others made without permission, payment, or credit.

It is time tech companies faced consistent standards. If Apple deserves protection for its chips and sensors, so too do writers, researchers, and artists whose creations power the AI age.