Apple faces unprecedented talent exodus as engineers flock to OpenAI and Meta amid AI struggles

Report: Apple Bleeding Talent to OpenAI

Dozens of Apple engineers and designers with expertise in audio, watch design, robotics, and other core product areas have left the company for OpenAI in recent months, the Wall Street Journal reports. According to the Wall Street Journal, a review of data from LinkedIn suggests a signifiant scale and concentration of talent now moving specifically to OpenAI as it builds a dedicated hardware division. The reviewed profiles show that former Apple staff joining OpenAI include contributors to multiple flagship categories, ranging from wearable-device industrial design to platform-level audio technologies used across the iPhone, AirPods, and Apple Watch. Several individuals also listed experience in robotics. OpenAI is expected to launch its first hardware device next year. Earlier this week, it emerged that Meta had hired multiple Apple employees, including longtime Apple designer Alan Dye, while conducting its own recruiting blitz for AI and smartglasses development. Meanwhile, Apple announced the retirement of Senior Vice President and General Counsel Kate Adams, Lisa Jackson, Vice President of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives, and AI chief John Giannandrea. Earlier this year, Apple lost Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams, who is retiring, and Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri. There have also been rumors about Apple CEO Tim Cook retiring, with rumors suggesting he is preparing to leave his role as soon as next year.

Mass exodus at Apple: Why AI chief, policy boss, design head all walked out in 3 days

Apple executive departures: Apple has been hit by an unusual wave of high-level departures, with four senior executives, the company's AI chief, its head of user interface design, its general counsel, and its vice president of environment and policy, leaving within just seventy-two hours this week. While early coverage has treated the exits as unrelated, the pattern fits into a much larger breakdown inside Apple's long-standing design and leadership structure, as per a Substack post by entrepreneur and Pet Express CEO Shanaka Anslem Perera. Perera pointed out that tracing how Apple's design institution slowly unraveled over the past several years shows that industrial design team built under Jony Ive once operated as a tightly connected unit with shared experience going back to the original iMac, iPod, and iPhone. That continuity began to weaken after Ive left in June 2019. ALSO READ: Bitcoin price prediction 2026: Why JPMorgan forecasts BTC USD to reach $170,000 despite market slump but warns about key risks Some designers followed Ive to his firm LoveFrom, including Wan Si, Chris Wilson, Patch Kessler, and Jeff Tiller. Evans Hankey, handpicked by Ive as his successor, announced in 2022 that she would stay only through 2023 to manage the transition, as per the Substack post. Bloomberg later reported that Apple struggled to replace her because so many experienced designers had already departed and because promoting one remaining designer risked creating unrest. The exits continued. In February 2024, Bart Andre, who had been with Apple for thirty-two years, retired. A few months later, Duncan Kerr left after twenty-five years, and Peter Russell-Clarke departed for a space technology company after seventeen years. ALSO READ: Costco stock price today: Why COST shares are falling despite strong quarterly sales By 2025, the pace accelerated sharply. In one month, November, at least twenty-five former Apple employees joined OpenAI's hardware project, ranging from camera engineering to silicon and Vision Pro development. This week, user interface chief Alan Dye and his deputy Billy Sorrentino left for Meta, marking the exit of nearly all of the leaders who had shaped Apple's modern visual identity. The people leaving Apple aren't scattering randomly, they're collecting around three major destinations. OpenAI and LoveFrom have drawn some of the most senior designers. OpenAI acquired Jony Ive's hardware startup io Products for $6.5 billion, bringing in Evans Hankey, Tang Tan, Scott Cannon, Patrick Coffman, and Shota Aoyagi. Meta has mounted the most aggressive recruitment push. The company hired Apple's Foundation Models head Ruoming Pang with a compensation package reported at more than $200 million. Several members of his team, Mark Lee, Tom Gunter, and Bowen Zhang, followed. Ke Yang, who led Apple's conversational AI search effort, left in October, and Jian Zhang, Apple's lead AI researcher for robotics, joined Meta in September. This week's departures of Dye and Sorrentino give Meta control of Apple's former user interface design leadership. AI startups have attracted younger designers, including Abidur Chowdhury, known for his work on iPhone Air. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, this wave of turnover is not expected to stop here. Even Apple CEO Tim Cook is reportedly preparing for an eventual transition as he nears retirement age, and speculation about who might succeed him is already building. For investors, the rapid outflow of top talent is becoming harder to ignore. Throughout the year, Apple struggled to hit its own targets for rolling out AI features across its devices, but it avoided major backlash thanks to continued strong sales and little evidence that customers were switching to other brands, as per a Bloomberg report. But the grace period won't last forever. If 2025 was the year Apple benefited from patience and optimism, then 2026 is shaping up to be the deadline for its backup plan, as per the Bloomberg report. Should the company fall short again in delivering compelling and useful AI features, the long-term picture for Apple could become far more concerning. Why are so many Apple executives leaving at once? Four senior leaders left within 72 hours, forming part of a much longer pattern of departures that began after Jony Ive's exit. Where are these former Apple employees going? Most are landing at OpenAI, Meta, or rapidly growing AI startups.

What the heck is going on at Apple?

Apple for decades has been known for a consistent string of design-forward, tech-defining consumer products that have shaped how people use technology. Now the company known for its steadiness is going through a shakeup at the top, as both Apple and the tech industry at large are at a crossroads. Apple announced the departures of three executive team members in less than a week. Meta poached a key Apple design leader. And speculation is mounting that Tim Cook may be preparing to step aside as CEO. The changes come as critics say Apple, once a tech leader, is behind in the next big wave: artificial intelligence. For one of the world's most valuable tech companies, a change in leadership could mean a change in how it conceives, designs and creates products used around the world every single day. "The only thing we can read into this is that we're headed to a time of increased volatility for Apple," said Robert Siegel, a longtime venture capitalist and lecturer at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Apple stock (AAPL) is up roughly 12 per cent this year, a much smaller jump than the 30 per cent increase it saw in 2024. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Planned departures for the following Apple executives were announced just this week: Apple is bringing in Meta chief legal officer Jennifer Newstead to lead government affairs after Adams retires and serve as its new general counsel. The environment and social initiatives teams will now report to Sabih Khan, Apple's chief operating officer. Amar Subramanya, Microsoft's corporate vice president of AI, will be Apple's new vice president of AI. And earlier this year, Jeff Williams stepped back from his role as Apple's chief operating officer. Apple isn't the only tech giant making structural changes. Meta on Thursday said it's shifting some investment away from its Metaverse virtual reality project and towards AI glasses and wearables. Amazon laid off 14,000 people in October as part of a push to move faster in AI by operating more leanly. And Google last year combined its hardware and software teams to better integrate AI into its products across the board. But Apple is known for having a uniquely tight-knit company culture driven by secrecy. "This is against the typical culture of Apple. But they need to rip the Band-Aid off," said Dan Ives, global head of tech research for Wedbush Securities. "Because the AI strategy has been invisible, and it's going to define Cook's legacy, how he handles this chapter." The leadership shakeup comes as questions about Apple's future loom. Apple delayed a major update to its Siri voice assistant that was expected to bring it closer to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, turning Siri from a question-and-answer machine into an assistant that can act on a user's behalf and incorporate information from a person's phone to personalize responses. But that upgrade has been pushed off until next year, and Apple's other AI updates for iPhones, Macs and iPads have been minimal this year. And Apple's expensive Vision Pro headset, the first new computing category the company has introduced since the decade-old Apple Watch, is still a niche product. At the same time, Meta, Google, Samsung and OpenAI have announced significant product expansions in AI this year - from Meta's new Ray-Ban Display smart glasses to Google and Samsung's Gemini-powered headset and OpenAI's push into shopping and web browsers. Google's Gemini 3 model has also been making waves since its November launch. Wall Street wants answers about Apple's AI strategy. In a July earnings call, analysts asked Apple about Siri's role in driving new products and whether AI chatbots are threatening Apple's relevance in internet searches. Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of services, even said during his testimony in a Google antitrust hearing that people may not need an iPhone 10 years from now. Now Dye, largely the face of Apple's design studio following the 2019 departure of former design chief Jony Ive, is joining Meta to help shape what the company sees as the next wave of computing. And Ive is helping OpenAI create its first hardware product. Dye's decision to join Meta is "more of a direct threat to Apple" compared to the other announced departures, said Joe Tigay, portfolio manager of the Rational Equity Armor Fund. Despite facing pressure in AI, iPhone 17 sales have been strong and are only expected to climb higher next year. Apple is expected to surpass Samsung in smartphone shipments this year for the first time since 2011, according to Counterpoint Research. The company is also one of the few to cross the $4 trillion market capitalization threshold, along with AI giants Nvidia and Microsoft. And change isn't always a bad thing, according to Siegel, especially while industries are going through transitions as the tech sector currently is with AI. Bringing in new hires or promoting people from within can "give a different point of view when a company can get trapped in a way of thinking and doing things," he said. That could be just what Apple needs, as some analysts say the clock is ticking for Apple to make bigger leaps in AI. "You can't have a fourth industrial revolution and watch the AI party through the windows on the outside," said Ives. "And clearly they need massive changes in leadership."