Apple OpenAI Trade Secret Lawsuit

Apple just sued OpenAI for trade-secret theft. Buried in the complaint is the number every executive should be reading twice: over 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI.

This isn't really a lawsuit about two engineers and an unreturned laptop. It's the moment the AI talent war became a legal war.

For a decade, "people leave, knowledge walks" was treated as the cost of doing business in tech. When the knowledge walking out the door is your unannounced hardware roadmap, and it's walking toward the single best-funded competitor in the market, that calculus changes fast.

Apple alleges the departures weren't incidental. The complaint describes coaching on how to evade security procedures and candidates asked to bring hardware components to interviews. Whether or not that holds up in court, boards are going to start asking a harder question: what actually protects our IP when a rival can out-compensate us for the very people who built it?

The uncomfortable answer for most companies is: not much. Non-competes are weakening or unenforceable in key states. Trade-secret law is your real perimeter, and it only works if you've documented what's confidential, controlled access, and can prove it left with someone.

The AI race is usually framed as models and compute. This is a reminder that the most contested asset is still the person who knows how it was built.

If you were advising a board today, would you tighten IP controls or accept talent mobility as the price of competing?