Apple’s OpenAI lawsuit is about who gets to define the post-smartphone era

Today on Decoder, I’m talking with Hayden Field, The Verge’s senior AI reporter, about the major trade secrets lawsuit between Apple and OpenAI and what this tells us about OpenAI’s future.

Apple’s OpenAI lawsuit is about who gets to define the post-smartphone era

OpenAI can’t afford another lawsuit, especially not with a company like Apple.

By now I’m sure most Decoder listeners are familiar with Apple’s allegations in this case. The company says a number of ex-Apple employees at OpenAI targeted Apple’s trade secrets in job interviews and even downloaded files from Apple’s servers related to hardware manufacturing. The claims are shocking, although OpenAI denies them, and we have yet to see the company’s legal response.

Hayden has been covering OpenAI for years now, and she also just talked to a bunch of lawyers who specialize in intellectual property and trade secret law to get a sense of how serious this case is. The answer is not entirely positive for OpenAI, which spent $6.5 billion to acquire legendary Apple designer Jony Ive’s AI hardware startup, io Products, back in 2025.

As you’ll hear Hayden explain, Apple is a notoriously tenacious litigant, and we have lots of tech industry history to back up that reputation. But those cases were against companies at the scale of Microsoft and Samsung, giant corporations that could afford the cost and distraction of this kind of litigation.

OpenAI isn’t yet that kind of company. It’s still burning cash and a little strategically adrift as it tries to compete in both enterprise and consumer markets, and it’s turning over executives on a regular basis. So Hayden and I spent a lot of time talking about what this case might mean for a company that defined the early part of the AI boom, but which lately always seems to be in a crisis of one sort or another.

Okay: Verge senior AI reporter Hayden Field on the Apple-OpenAI lawsuit, and how the AI industry might change because of it. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Hayden Field, you’re the senior AI reporter for The Verge. Welcome back to Decoder.

Thanks. Great to be here.

Once again, we’re going to talk about OpenAI, Hayden.

Once again, it never stops.

We’re going to talk about whether OpenAI can maintain focus at a time of great distraction, which seems to be a theme with that company. Although this time, it’s not their own distraction. It’s a distraction from out in the world, maybe caused by some of their own behavior.

Of course, we’re talking about the Apple trade secret lawsuit. It feels like a big deal. Apple is accusing OpenAI of stealing all kinds of information from that company, even in job interviews — asking people in job interviews to tell them what they know about Apple products. Tell us briefly about this lawsuit and what’s going on here.

Definitely. So, it is crazy. I wrote a piece last week titled “Sam Altman didn’t need another lawsuit,” and that’s really the situation here. It seems pretty egregious from some of the claims that Apple is making. A former Apple employee was allegedly soliciting trade secrets over interviews, asking people to maybe bring pieces of hardware outside the Apple office to OpenAI to do a “show and tell” in interviews, things like that.

There’s a lot of allegations being made that are pretty crazy. But then when I actually interviewed a bunch of experts last week, they said they’ve seen all of this before, a lot. It’s just they haven’t seen all of it in one case with two key players.

Some of this stuff is pretty egregious, if it turns out to be true. But also, to the experts in the space, they’re saying, “Oh, we see this all the time with trade secrets cases. It’s not crazy. What’s really crazy is that it’s all in one case and that it’s two really large companies.”

It’s really interesting. It’s just a pattern, maybe not worth diving into at great length, but in the ‘90s, Apple pushed copyright law to the limit. They sued Microsoft for allegedly infringing on how the Mac looked and felt with Windows. I will point out that Windows still exists, Microsoft is fine.

And then in the 2000s and early 2010s, Apple pushed patent law to the limit, suing Samsung for allegedly violating a bunch of patents with Android and Galaxy phones because Apple felt that they had protected the iPhone. Samsung eventually paid about $1 billion in damages and those cases just went around in circles forever.

But I’ll point out that Android still exists, Samsung is doing just fine. Apple may have redefined patent law around 3G and 4G licensing, but fundamentally, it did not actually succeed in stopping its competitors with intellectual property lawsuits.

So, you go from copyright to patent and now trade secrets, which is the third big intellectual property, and Apple’s doing it again with OpenAI. My big question is whether OpenAI can just pay the money the way that Microsoft and Samsung were able to just pay the money. If you look at Samsung, spending $1 billion in penalty fees to get Galaxy phones off the ground and be a major competitor in mobile is maybe the easiest and best investment that company ever made.

But I don’t know if OpenAI is the same company at the same moment. It certainly seems like all of the Apple employees that went over to OpenAI maybe pushed the limit too much, at least from the story that Apple’s telling us right now.

It’s pretty crazy reading the wildest claims from the lawsuit and also the messages that were being exchanged. One of them allegedly accessed Apple confidential information on a device and then said, “LOL! So funny that I can access this.” There’s a lot there.

I’ve been wondering the same thing. It really depends on Apple’s willingness to be petty or be super logical here. When I interviewed a bunch of lawyers about this, they said Apple is a notoriously tenacious litigant, as we’ve seen in those past cases. But also, they really will take things far. They have a lot of money and they’re willing to use it. It really just depends on how mad they are.

I think that they would potentially settle if OpenAI paid them enough, but will OpenAI be able to do that? They’re already having a really tough year. They’re about to IPO, all the investors are looking at their bottom line, wondering when they’re going to turn a profit. It’s a tough time to be shelling out a ton of money to Apple. We’ll have to see what they do.

I think it’s going to go to trial and be a very drawn-out years-long thing. That’s what a lot of the lawyers I interviewed said as well. But I could see a world in which they just figure out a way to get all this money together and pay and maybe Apple accepts it.

In the Samsung patent cases, they lasted forever. In the middle of it, Tim Cook was at a Code Conference and I asked him, “What are you doing? Is this accomplishing anything?” And he looked at me very seriously and he said, “Well, we think the fees for licensing standard essential patents are out of whack.” And I was like, “That is not the reason you’re doing any of this. That’s not the point, the point is that you were mad and you wanted to run this lawsuit to ground and you’re going to run this lawsuit to ground no matter what the nominal reason is.”

That feels like a big piece of the puzzle here. OpenAI has taken a bunch of Apple employees. Famously Jony Ive, Apple’s most famous designer, is working with OpenAI on hardware devices. Tang Tan, who is OpenAI’s chief hardware officer. He had a reputation at Apple for “playing fast and loose,” that’s from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg.

He seems like the central character in the story, not so much Jony Ive, but Tang Tan. And that piece where it’s a bunch of ex-Apple people maybe playing too fast and loose almost feels like it’s personal, almost feels like there’s a lot of emotions involved. Talk about Tang Tan and talk about what all these folks are alleged to have done that feels like it’s a little more personal than your standard big corporate dispute.

On what you said about talking to Tim Cook, I truly believe people underestimate companies’ pettiness. We’ve seen it in recent years, like with the OpenAI-Elon Musk lawsuit. There are so many things that could have been avoided if companies weren’t trying to just be petty, which is fine. They can do that, they have enough money to do that. But people underestimate how much that plays a part sometimes in these things.

As for Tang Tan, yeah, he worked at Apple for 24 years. He was the VP of the Apple Watch. He left in 2024 to work on Jony Ive’s hardware company, io Products, which obviously OpenAI ended up purchasing.

OpenAI then appointed him as chief hardware officer. So he had a C-suite role at OpenAI, but this is after 24 years at Apple. According to Apple’s lawsuit claims, he was the mastermind of a lot of this trade secrets gathering, regarding interviews that he would conduct and ask about secret code-named projects. And then the person being interviewed would feel like maybe they were able to tell him stuff because, oh, well, why would he know the name of this project or these details about it if he wasn’t involved also? So, they felt they could speak more freely, allegedly.

There were other times that he asked, “Hey, why don’t you bring some batteries or other pieces of hardware outside the Apple office that you’ve worked on in the past so that we can do a show and tell?” It’s very interesting to go through these claims. It just seemed like he really was not worried about what was going to come of this, if these claims are true.

The other major character here is Jony Ive, Apple’s very famous ex-designer who worked with Steve Jobs and all of those famous projects. I would say Ive reportedly has a very testy relationship with Apple.

Now that he’s left, he’s certainly made that clear in various interviews and statements. And he’s working with Sam Altman on new devices. He made a video with Sam Altman, which I can only describe as a romantic coffee date.

Absolutely.

In which they described the phone and the laptop as legacy devices.

It was instantly memed. I have to say the memes were amazing.

It’s very good. And they shut down half of San Francisco to make it. I thought Ive calling the phone and the laptop legacy devices in that video was just a straight shot at Apple. These are the things that he made, that he revolutionized in many, many ways. And he’s like, “These are over now.”