Apple reportedly poached employees from A123 Systems to work on battery tech, now faces unfair competition lawsuit
Apple has poached five key engineers from A123 Systems to work in a new battery division at the Cupertino technology company, with some hires possibly going as far back as June, a new report claims.
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple is quietly assembling a battery division, and the same reporting that surfaced the A123 hires also mapped out the experts Apple recruited to build an electric car — battery chemistry being a core input for that effort. The twist is who it took them from: A123 Systems, a battery maker whose engineers are exactly the specialists an automotive-scale power program needs.
A123's response was to sue rather than absorb the loss, filing an unfair competition claim against a company many times its size — a small supplier using the courts as its only lever over a poacher. The suit sits inside a broader 2015 talent war in which Tesla had already pulled more than 150 employees from Apple while Apple dangled $250,000 signing bonuses to pull back.
First-order effects
- A123 loses five key battery engineers to a new Apple division — some possibly gone since June — while bearing the legal cost of challenging a far larger rival in court.
Second-order effects
- The suit puts every battery and auto supplier on notice that losing engineers to Apple now carries litigation risk, raising the price of Apple's hiring spree just as it scales up the car program.
- It escalates the reciprocal poaching dynamic already running between Apple and Tesla, where signing bonuses alone were failing to reverse the flow.
Third-order effects
- The case previews where these disputes go next: when talent moves carry trade secrets, unfair-competition claims give way to IP theft allegations — the pattern Apple itself later invoked when claiming OpenAI recruited 400+ ex-employees, including one who allegedly kept a work laptop and exploited a bug to access Apple's cloud storage. The eventual outcome matters less than the precedent that hiring battles end up in court.
The trend: Silicon Valley's talent wars are migrating from quiet poaching to litigation, with employee departures increasingly framed as intellectual-property threats.