Apple filed suit against OpenAI on Friday, claiming the startup stole trade secrets to build hardware. The complaint alleges OpenAI’s device business is “rotten to its core.” This is the same Apple that spent a decade copying Samsung’s notification drawer, then sued Samsung for copying it back.
The irony here is so dense it has its own gravitational field. Apple built a $3 trillion empire by taking Unix, repackaging it, and calling it innovation. OpenAI took transformer architecture from Google researchers and called it AGI. Now both companies are in court screaming about intellectual property theft like they invented the concept of standing on other people’s shoulders.
What actually happened? OpenAI hired some ex-Apple engineers. Those engineers, apparently, remembered things they learned at Apple. Apple claims this amounts to theft of proprietary knowledge. OpenAI claims the engineers didn’t steal anything—they just used general skills and experience, which is what every engineer does when they change jobs. This is a distinction that will cost both sides eight figures to litigate.
The real comedy: tech’s entire mythology is built on the narrative of innovation as theft rebranded as disruption. Wozniak and Jobs borrowed from Xerox. Bezos borrowed from Walmart’s logistics. Musk borrowed from rocket science textbooks. But the moment someone borrows from you, suddenly it’s war.
Apple called OpenAI’s hardware “rotten to its core.” A company selling $3,500 Vision Pro headsets that nobody asked for is lecturing someone else about rot.