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. 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

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