What Apple’s OpenAI lawsuit is really about

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**Nilay Patel** (0:35)
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Hayden Field, The Verge's senior AI reporter, about the major trade secret lawsuit between Apple and OpenAI, and what this tells us about OpenAI's future. But 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 and job interviews, and even downloaded files from Apple servers related to hardware manufacturing. The claims are shocking, although OpenAI denies them, and we have yet to see that company's legal response. Hayden has been covering OpenAI for years now, and she talked to a number of lawyers who specialized 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 more than $6.5 billion to acquire the 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 that reputation up. There's Apple's big fight with Microsoft over the design of Windows in the 80s and 90s, all the way up to the billion-dollar patent infringement saga with Samsung over Android in the early 2010s. Apple has gone to court for far less. 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, a little strategically adrift as it tries to compete in both consumer and enterprise 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.
Hayden Field, you're the Senior AI Reporter for The Verge. Welcome back to Decoder.

**Hayden Field** (2:45)
Thanks. Great to be here.

**Nilay Patel** (2:47)
Once again, we're going to talk about OpenAI, Hayden.

**Hayden Field** (2:50)
Once again, it never stops.

**Nilay Patel** (2:52)
We're going to talk about whether OpenAI can maintain focus at a time of great distraction, which seems to be just 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, talking about the Apple trade secret lawsuit, it feels like a big deal. Apple is accusing OpenAI of stealing all kinds of information for 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.

**Hayden Field** (3:26)
I wrote a piece last week called Sam Altman Didn't Need Another Lawsuit, and that's really the situation here. I mean, it seems pretty egregious from some of the claims that Apple is making. Apparently, a former Apple employee was soliciting trade secrets, allegedly, over interviews, asking people to maybe bring pieces of hardware outside the office, 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, I thought. 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, it seems, if it comes out to be true. But also, to the experts in the space, they're like, 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.

**Nilay Patel** (4:28)
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. And Samsung eventually paid about a billion dollars in damages, and those cases just sort of went around in circles forever. But I'll point out that Android still exists. Samsung is doing just fine.