Apple has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the company of misappropriating trade secrets by recruiting current and former Apple employees. During a discussion on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, experts debated the implications of this legal action on OpenAI’s plans to enter the hardware market and pursue an IPO. The lawsuit raises concerns about potential delays in OpenAI's projects, including a mobile smart speaker, and could impact investor confidence as the company prepares to go public. OpenAI has denied any wrongdoing and expressed confidence in their legal standing, but the situation introduces uncertainty around their business strategy and growth plans.

Checking your Browser…

Verifying...

Stuck? Troubleshoot

Success!

Verification failed

Verification expired

Verification expired

Privacy • Help

Sam Altman and Jony Ive Image Credits: OpenAI

Hardware

Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Share on Reddit Share over Email Copy Share Link

Can an Apple lawsuit derail OpenAI’s hardware plans?

Anthony Ha

12:24 PM PDT · July 19, 2026

Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Share on Reddit Share over Email Copy Share Link

Megaphone Embeddable Player

Listen onApple Podcasts Listen onSpotify

Apple recently filed a trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the AI company of a pattern of misconduct aimed at getting current and former Apple employees to share confidential information. (In response, OpenAI said it is “not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit.”)

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I debated whether this lawsuit will cast a shadow over OpenAI’s much-discussed plans to get into the hardware business (starting with a mobile smart speaker) and go public.

“Even setting aside whether or not the court grants any kind of injunctive relief or any kind of restraining order over what OpenAI is doing, it just naturally can lead to that sort of situation where it’s going to cause some delays in what OpenAI is working on,” Sean suggested. “Which I’m sure was probably part of the reasoning behind Apple doing this. They don’t do this stuff willy nilly.”

With all those plans on the line, will OpenAI try to settle this as quickly as possible, or did it learn from its recent courtroom victory against Elon Musk that it can endure the cost and embarrassment of a trial? Kirsten, at least, predicts the latter.

Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Kirsten Korosec: Sean, how do you feel about Sam Altman listening to you with a little device maybe in your pocket?

Sean O’Kane: I’m good. Maybe that’s predictable, but I’m good. No thanks.

How Apple's big lawsuit could disrupt OpenAI's IPO plans | Equity Podcast

0 seconds of 33 minutes, 12 secondsVolume 0%

Press shift question mark to access a list of keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard ShortcutsEnabledDisabled

Shortcuts Open/Close/ or ?

Play/PauseSPACE

Increase Volume↑

Decrease Volume↓

Seek Forward→

Seek Backward←

Captions On/Offc

Fullscreen/Exit Fullscreenf

Mute/Unmutem

Decrease Caption Size-

Increase Caption Size+ or =

Seek %0-9

Live

00:00

33:12

This video file cannot be played.(Error Code: 232011)

We’ll get into it, I’m sure, but this is allegedly the first product that OpenAI has been working on in its hardware division with Jony Ive and company. They’ve been really coy ever since that weird video they put out last year of them sitting at that coffee shop or bar in San Francisco and sort of talking very vaguely about hardware and legacy devices, meaning laptops and phones. And so if this is the direction they’re headed in, all power to people who want to have somebody like that always listening to them. This is not going to be for me.

Anthony Ha: Part of what we have to remember about those kinds of devices is also that, depending on how mobile it is, it’s not just listening to you, it’s listening to the people around you. I might be fine with it — I’m not fine with it, but let’s say I was — but then if we met up in-person at Disrupt, then suddenly it might be listening to all of us.

There’s all kinds of social norms that are going to have to be renegotiated if these things become widespread. I think we should make fun of and criticize people who record other people without consent.

Kirsten: Well, I bring up the device that has been speculated about for a really long time, and we’ll see what it really ends up being once it’s officially introduced, but it’s important in the context of this lawsuit that Apple filed last Friday.

It was the biggest news of the week, certainly, and this is a trade secret lawsuit. It has some pretty wild allegations and we should very much emphasize these are allegations that have been filed in a complaint by Apple. But what it is accusing OpenAI of is a pattern of misconduct at the highest levels, specifically directed towards OpenAI employees who used to work at Apple. And in fact they’ve named the chief hardware officer Tang Tan in this lawsuit.

This is all important because Apple is accusing OpenAI of essentially stealing their trade secrets, but in the context of that, this could be then used for a competing hardware product. I’m wondering if maybe we don’t get into whether this lawsuit has merits, because we haven’t gone through full discovery, but what are your initial impressions of the lawsuit aside from the fact that wow, this is going to be entertaining?

Sean: Two things. One, this is a pretty big risk potentially to whatever it is OpenAI is working on. Even setting aside whether or not the court grants any kind of injunctive relief or any kind of restraining order over what OpenAI is doing, it just naturally can lead to that sort of situation where it’s going to cause some delays in what OpenAI is working on, which I’m sure was probably part of the reasoning behind Apple doing this. They don’t do this stuff willy nilly.

The other is that we think that OpenAI is — we know that they’ve filed confidentially for an IPO. We think it might happen as early as the end of this year, or early next year, if you believe Sam Altman’s cautious language around the IPO. And this just raises a whole bunch of questions around that because, on the one hand, we think their business right now is probably overwhelmingly the software; they’re not really factoring in any hardware business into that picture at the moment.

They’re about to go to the markets and they’re going to be pitching bankers and investors on where they think their addressable market should be, and if they have a big amount of that pegged to a potential hardware division and hardware products, this could be a huge risk to that and changes a lot of the calculus of sort of how the IPO gets priced. So that’s where my head’s at.

Anthony: One [allegation] that I assume that Apple must have pretty solid like numbers on is, they said more than 400 Apple employees now work at OpenAI. Granted, both of them are very large companies with many thousands or tens of thousands of employees. So as a percentage, it’s not necessarily huge. But that seems like a lot of people and a pretty serious talent drain.

And the other thing I’m wondering is related to Sean’s point. With the context of the potential IPO, how much damage did OpenAI ultimately take from a marketing and brand perspective from the trial it already went through? That it seemed to basically win, but there was a lot of not-terrible-but-kind-of-embarrassing dirty laundry that came out in the testimony. To what extent are they just like, “We do not want to go through that again”? Or did they take the lesson of, “Hey, we went through it and we survived and we’ll be okay if we have to do another trial with Apple”?

Kirsten: I fully predict the latter, by the way.

Topics

AI, Apple, Gadgets, Hardware, OpenAI

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Share on Reddit Share over Email Copy Share Link

Anthony Ha

Anthony Ha on Bluesky Anthony Ha on Linkedin

Anthony Ha is TechCrunch’s weekend editor. Previously, he worked as a tech reporter at Adweek, a senior editor at VentureBeat, a local government reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, and vice president of content at a VC firm. He lives in New York City.

You can contact or verify outreach from Anthony by emailing anthony.ha@techcrunch.com.

View Bio

Event Logo

November 4

Boston

Last chance to save up to $190 on TechCrunch Founder Summit. Join 1,000+ founders and VCs at all stages for real-world scaling insights and connections that move the needle.

Savings end June 26, 11:59 p.m. PT.

REGISTER NOW

Most Popular

Keep reading

Image Credits: Panathenea (opens in a new window) /

Venture

Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Share on Reddit Share over Email Copy Share Link

Neil Rimer thinks the AI money is coming back out

Connie Loizos

9:47 PM PDT · July 17, 2026

In late May, Neil Rimer said something during a sit-down I had with him in Athens that I haven’t been able to shake. At a vibrant new tech festival in the city, talking about the wealth piling up around AI, he said he has “a strong sense that there will be some sort of a redistribution.” He continued on. “It’ll either be voluntary or it’ll be involuntary, but it’ll happen, and I hope it’s voluntary,” he told me, adding that he thinks tech leaders “can play a leading role in seeing that through.”

Coming from most people, that would sound like standard-issue populism. Coming from Rimer, a co-founder of Index Ventures, one of the most successful venture firms of the last three decades, it seemed a striking thing to say in public.

Rimer stepped back from day-to-day investing in 2021, and these days spends much of his time in Athens, where his wife is from and where his children treasure their Greek passports. He turned up to our interview in a rumpled button-down and jeans, not the quarter-zips and fine knitwear that mark so many of his peers. Yet Index’s returns in recent years have been exceptional: the firm has raised roughly $15 billion from outside investors since its founding, and last year’s exits, including Figma’s IPO and Google’s purchase of the cybersecurity firm Wiz, reportedly netted Index roughly $9 billion.

Rimer has found ways to give back. He sits on the board of Endeavor Greece, which mentors entrepreneurs in emerging markets, and chaired the board of Human Rights Watch from 2019 to 2025. In late 2021, he and his father and two brothers gave $13 million to McGill University to renovate a campus building, now the Rimer Building, and found a new Institute for Indigenous Research and Knowledges.

In the meantime, his comment about redistribution comes at an odd moment, to be charitable, for giving. The Giving Pledge, the promise Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched in 2010 to get billionaires to commit half their fortunes to charity, is becoming increasingly irrelevant. One hundred and thirteen families signed in its first five years, then 72, then 43, then just four in all of 2024, per a New York Times report in March that underscored how out-of-fashion philanthropy has become among some of the richest people in tech. (Noted that piece: “Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, has said that his businesses ‘ are philanthropy.’”)

The pattern appears to hold beyond the Pledge. Total American charitable giving hit a record $592.5 billion in 2024, but the number of Americans actually giving has fallen for five straight years, down 4.5% in 2024 alone, according to the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Two-thirds of households donated in 2000; roughly half do now, and Bank of America and Lilly Family School data shows even affluent-household giving has slipped, from 90% in 2017 to 81% last year.

The pattern shows up in Index’s own portfolio, which includes Anthropic. Business Insider recently asked a financial planner, Alex Caswell, whether his newly wealthy clients, many of them Anthropic employees tied to effective altruism, were pledging to give away the bulk of their fortunes. Anthropic matches employee donations of up to 25% of their equity to charity, and some of Caswell’s clients have used it, he told BI, but most weren’t building philanthropy into their plans at all; they were focused on angel investing or starting their own companies. “That’s what I’m seeing more than the desire to become philanthropic,” he told the outlet.

Unsurprisingly, the absence of voluntary giving is now running up against attempts to legislate the outcome instead. California voters will decide this year on a 5% one-time wealth tax that targets the state’s billionaires. Some, including Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have already moved their primary residences to South Florida to be on the safe side.

OpenAI is reportedly considering going public in 2027, and cynically, one reason among others may be that the tax, if passed, will calculate net worth based on an individual’s worldwide assets as of the end of this calendar year.

As expectedly, there is plenty of opposition to any kind of wealth-redistribution measure of this scale, including by Governor Gavin Newsom, and including by economists who point out that many industrialized countries have repealed similar wealth taxes since 1990 after watching their wealthy residents skedaddle.

Other options on the table are as controversial. OpenAI has reportedly discussed handing the federal government a 5% equity stake, an idea CEO Sam Altman has framed as sharing AI’s upside with the public, and critics see instead as a way to buy political cover in Washington. In either case, Silicon Valley has never been eager to put Uncle Sam on the cap table. Joked veteran investor Roelof Botha during a separate sit-down with this editor last year: “[Some] of the most dangerous words in the world are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

Against this backdrop, it’s worth thinking through how much wealth is amassing outside these mechanisms. Musk is worth just over $1 trillion, after SpaceX’s IPO last month made him the first person to reach that mark. It’s nearly so unfathomable an amount that outlets have taken to illustrations to help people understand it. Forbes counted 45 new AI billionaires in its 2026 rankings alone, worth a combined $2.9 trillion, and that’s before either Anthropic or OpenAI has gone public.

In that same Business Insider story about Anthropic employees, it notes that once Anthropic and OpenAI complete their IPOs, their combined employees will hold enough wealth to buy nearly a third of all homes in the San Francisco metro area.

It feels unprecedented, but whether it represents an historic extreme is a matter of some debate. The share of wealth held by the top 1% of U.S. households hit 31.7% in the third quarter of last year, a record since the Federal Reserve began tracking the data in 1989, and roughly equal to what the other 90% of households outside the top decile held combined.

That’s still below the 45% the top 1% commanded as the Gilded Age was nearing its end. But narrow the lens to the tippy top, and the picture flips. Renowned economist Gabriel Zucman calculates that at the height of the Gilded Age, around 1910, America’s four largest fortunes were worth a combined 4% of U.S. GDP. Today, that same sliver of the population — now 19 households instead of four — is worth 14%.

Rimer’s two paths, voluntary or forced, have precedent from the last time American wealth concentration reached this level. In 1889, at the peak of the first Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie published an essay arguing that a rich man should treat his fortune as a trust to be distributed for the public good within his own lifetime, calling it a disgrace to die wealthy. That essay, “ The Gospel of Wealth,” became the founding document of modern philanthropy and the intellectual ancestor of the Giving Pledge.

It didn’t hold off the other path for long, though. By the mid-1930s, Louisiana Senator Huey Long had built a national following behind a program called Share Our Wealth, demanding steep taxes on the rich to fund a guaranteed income for every American. Worried about losing working-class support to Long, Franklin Roosevelt pushed through what the press called the “soak-the-rich tax,” raising the top marginal income tax rate as high as 79%. It redistributed less than Long wanted, but it remains the clearest example in American history of politically forced redistribution arriving once voluntary giving failed to adequately address the pressure building underneath it.

None of this is news to Rimer, who has spent his career in tech. What’s more curious to him is “the moral center of tech companies,” a fascination he traced to being a Stanford undergrad in 1984, when Apple discounted the first Macintosh for students and Steve Jobs and Apple’s other founders were, in his words, “heroes” for building something he felt was genuinely good for the world.

What troubles him now, he said, is hearing his own children talk about certain tech companies the way an earlier generation talked about defense contractors or cigarette makers.

That Rimer — as an investor in Anthropic and other tech companies — is a direct recipient of the windfall he says will eventually need to be shared gives him more authority, not less. He’d rather see his fellow beneficiaries choose to give some of the money back than have it taken from them. There’s an easy way to do this and a hard way, and Rimer is betting on people picking the easy one before history picks it for them.

Topics

AI, Venture

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Share on Reddit Share over Email Copy Share Link

Connie Loizos

Editor in Chief & General Manager

Connie Loizos on Twitter Connie Loizos on Bluesky Connie Loizos on Linkedin Connie Loizos's site

Loizos has been reporting on Silicon Valley since the late ’90s, when she joined the original Red Herring magazine. Previously the Silicon Valley Editor of TechCrunch, she was named Editor in Chief and General Manager of TechCrunch in September 2023. She’s also the founder of StrictlyVC, a daily e-newsletter and lecture series acquired by Yahoo in August 2023 and now operated as a sub brand of TechCrunch.

You can contact or verify outreach from Connie by emailing connie@strictlyvc.com or connie@techcrunch.com, or via encrypted message at ConnieLoizos.53 on Signal.

View Bio

Newsletters

Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news

TechCrunch Daily News

Every weekday and Sunday, you can get the best of TechCrunch’s coverage. Add TechCrunch Daily News to your subscription choices

Startups Weekly

Startups are the core of TechCrunch, so get our best coverage delivered weekly. Add Startups Weekly to your subscription choices

TechCrunch Week in Review

Get the best of our coverage, delivered to your inbox every Saturday. Add TechCrunch Week in Review to your subscription choices

TechCrunch Mobility

TechCrunch Mobility is your destination for transportation news and insight. Add TechCrunch Mobility to your subscription choices

No newsletters selected.

By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice.

Keep reading

Image Credits: Aalok Soni / Getty Images

Media & Entertainment

Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Share on Reddit Share over Email Copy Share Link

‘Odyssey’ director Christopher Nolan calls AI an obvious ‘Trojan horse’

Anthony Ha

7:52 AM PDT · July 19, 2026

Christopher Nolan, the Oscar-winning director whose new version of “The Odyssey” is currently conquering the box office, said it’s been “pretty encouraging” to see deep skepticism of AI, especially from young people.

Nolan was responding to a question from interviewer Hugo Travers, who publishes on YouTube under the name HugoDécrypte. Travers brought up the legendary Trojan horse, which plays a key role in Nolan’s film — just as the horse was a gift concealing murderous Greek invaders, he wondered if AI might be something “that you welcome in your daily life” only to see it become “something else and something darker.”

Laughing, Nolan responded, “I think AI is a Trojan horse that everybody knows the Greeks are inside.” He later described the technology as “a transparent horse, it’s made of glass.”

“I’ve never seen a technology advancing so rapidly [that’s been] so completely rejected by the public,” he said. “Everybody’s suspicion of it is so extreme, particularly young people. The reaction to AI videos online and people my children’s age immediately calling it ‘AI slop’ and coining that term and just putting it in a box.”

In Nolan’s view, this is “a very healthy skepticism, because technology is always going to give us great gifts, as you say, but it has to be viewed with skepticism.” Similarly, he said, “The motives of the people giving it to us also have to be viewed with skepticism. That’s when we’ll get the best out of a new technology, rather than just blind faith that everything’s going to be great.” (Meanwhile, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been angrily posting about the film’s nonwhite and transgender cast members.)

Nolan didn’t get more specific about what he views as the threat from AI, but the technology has been a growing source of concern in Hollywood and was a major focus during the writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023. The Directors Guild of America, where Nolan is president, also won some generative AI protections in its most recent contract.

The director has been famously resistant to other technologies, including smartphones; his embrace of film can make him seem simultaneously like a Luddite and a pioneer, with “The Odyssey” becoming the first feature film to be shot entirely on Imax film and cameras.

When The New York Times recently asked Nolan if he thinks of himself as a technophobe, he replied, “I think of myself as a techno-skeptic,” and said his love of film comes from the fact that it’s “better in terms of representing the way the eye sees the world than any digital imaging system I’ve seen.”

“I embrace new technology all the time, but it tends to be sold to people at the expense of systems that might still be valid and viable,” Nolan said. “That’s what I saw in my industry — throwing the baby out with the bath water. We almost lost film!”

Topics

AI, christopher nolan, Media & Entertainment, The Odyssey

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Share on Reddit Share over Email Copy Share Link

Anthony Ha

Anthony Ha on Bluesky Anthony Ha on Linkedin

You can contact or verify outreach from Anthony by emailing anthony.ha@techcrunch.com.

View Bio