Apple's Lawsuit Against OpenAI: A Deep Dive into the Controversy

New Delhi, India Jul 17, 2026 ALN: This week on Uncanny Valley, the team discusses the details behind Apple suing OpenAI over alleged stolen hardware secrets. And the company’s headaches don’t stop there—a group of OpenAI employees just started a super PAC to advocate for stronger AI guardrails. Plus, New York’s first-in-the-nation data center moratorium draws Donald Trump’s ire, DOGE stonewalls FOIA requests on its AI use at HUD, and ’s Emily Mullin explains the cyclosporiasis outbreak spreading across more than 30 states.

Articles mentioned in this episode:

• Apple Is Suing OpenAI for Allegedly Stealing Hardware Secrets
• OpenAI Staffers Are Funding a Rival Super PAC to Take on Their Boss
• New York Governor Signs First Statewide Data Center Moratorium
• DOGE Used AI for Housing Policy. The Government Won’t Say How
• The Explosive Diarrhea Outbreak Is About to Get Much Bigger

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Zoë Schiffer: Welcome to 's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoë Schiffer, contributing editor.

Brian Barrett: I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor.

Leah Feiger: And I'm Leah Feiger, director of politics and science.

Zoë Schiffer: This week we're discussing OpenAI's ongoing drama, both legal and reputational. Last Friday, Apple sued the company basically alleging that OpenAI has been stealing confidential hardware secrets. And now this week, learned that some OpenAI employees are launching a super PAC to push for AI guardrails. We'll get into all those details and whether these developments could further hurt OpenAI, particularly in its fight against Anthropic.

Brian Barrett: Also on the AI front, this week, New York State officially passed the first statewide data center moratorium. We'll dive into what that means exactly and whether this move could pave the way for other states to follow suit.

Leah Feiger: We'll also talk about how some members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE, used AI to actually shape housing policy. And we're going to check in on the disease sweeping the nation, cyclosporiasis, which is causing "turbo diarrhea" across the country.

Zoë Schiffer: OK, you guys, I'm really excited to start with this OpenAI drama because the company has been in the headlines a lot lately and not for fantastic reasons. So basically what happened was last Friday, Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for allegedly stealing information like unreleased iPhone parts and prototypes, confidential designs, documents about secret projects. That accusation sucks for OpenAI. It's pretty intense, but it gets really messy because Apple is basically saying that this theft, this alleged theft, mostly happened through former employees. OpenAI's chief hardware officer, Tang Tan, who spent 24 years at Apple, is named in the lawsuit and accused of encouraging people who are leaving Apple to bring with them proprietary information and unreleased technology. You guys, Brian, I'm so curious what you thought when this dropped.

Brian Barrett: I think it's fascinating. There's a lot of really interesting accusations in there. I think it's also like it's part of Apple's playbook that we haven't seen in a while, but it is something that Apple has done or threatened to do before. Tony Fadell, who is a longtime Apple guy, but then went on to start Nest, the thermostat company. He had also, I think he told a story recently in the wake of all this about how when he had started Nest, he hired several hundred Apple employees. Steve Jobs called him, threatened to sue, scream bloody murder. But what I thought Fidel said was interesting, and I don't know that it applies directly here, but reportedly what he says is that he said, "It's my job to hire great people. It's your job to keep them."

Zoë Schiffer: I forget that Apple is a pretty litigious company. They've famously sued employees for supposedly leaking stuff or taking proprietary stuff with them when they left Apple, which companies will do occasionally, but particularly for leaks, it is rare to see lawsuits come. But this is the area that I feel like Apple cares most about. It is so secretive about its products that when that stuff starts to get out of its hands, I think they really are quick to jump on it. My take here, and Leah, I'm curious to hear your thoughts, is that this isn't about getting damages from OpenAI. I think what Apple actually wants is to slow down OpenAI's hardware ambitions because it's really continuing—Apple is continuing to go all in on the iPhone as the primary computing platform for the AI era. And I do think that if we see an audio-first platform that works better for stuff where you do not need to look at a screen and you can just talk to an agent, that could be intimidating for them.

Brian Barrett: I think this is what's interesting to me too is some reporting came out this week also about what the device is eventually going to look like from Bloomberg and said it's going to be like a speaker. It's going to have some motorized elements so it'll move in some capacity. Reece Rogers, I hope he doesn't mind my sharing, said it sounded like a Furby, which I think is probably right. But look, if OpenAI is banking on hardware, I am skeptical. I feel like ultimately Apple can still make a speaker. And also because Apple is a more neutral party in all this, Apple can make a speaker that has a few different AI options to choose from potentially or has Siri AI, which is blown from Gemini. And ultimately, I do think it's going to come down to the device that you use most of the time is going to be the phone.

Zoë Schiffer: Well, I mean, that has been true for a long time. And I think we've seen even Apple try and get away from this very screen heavy life that we're all living with the face computer. The name is escaping me.

Brian Barrett: Vision Pro.

Zoë Schiffer: The Vision Pro. Thank you so much.

Brian Barrett: You don't think about Vision Pro every day?

Zoë Schiffer: No. I have to say that it lived and died very quickly, and I haven't thought about it since. But I think the issue, and this has been true for other AI hardware the devices, like the famous pin from Humane AI and all of that. There just are many things that are better to do on a screen, and I don't think that's going to change. However, if you can get agents and voice mode that works really, really well, there are other things that you really could just ask an agent to execute for you, and you might prefer not to look at a screen the whole time. And so I personally, as someone who has a very tortured relationship with my screens, I'm ready for something that could work a little bit better. But it's hard to execute correctly, and I don't think we've seen a product so far that has been able to do that. Just to ground what we're talking about a little bit more, OpenAI has hired more than 400 former Apple employees according to the lawsuit.

Leah Feiger: Wow.

Zoë Schiffer: And last year it paid $6.5 billion to acquire a startup called IO Products that was co-founded by longtime Apple executives, including Tan, Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey, and the most famous person, Jony Ive.

Brian Barrett: Yeah, it is a huge investment that they're making in this space, and it's obviously got a sting for Apple to be losing all of these people. Plus they've lost AI researchers to other companies as well. Apple's hemorrhaging AI talent and now hardware talent too, which really hits them where it hurts. What I am most excited about about this whole process is we're not even really there yet, is that lawsuits mean discovery, and—

Zoë Schiffer: Yay.

Brian Barrett: Yay, discovery, yay. And discovery means we're going to get to read so many emails of these companies talking trash about each other and themselves. And it's going to be such a delight. It's always a joy when these things happen.

Zoë Schiffer: It's so fun. No one is cattier than a lawyer with an IP issue.

Brian Barrett: Put that on a mug, Zoë.

Zoë Schiffer: They are.

Brian Barrett: Wow. Do we have merch yet? Can that be on—

Zoë Schiffer: I love it.

Brian Barrett: That's our merch. Yeah.

Zoë Schiffer: That's our merch.

Brian Barrett: OpenAI's headaches are not just limited to the Apple lawsuit this week. learned that OpenAI staffers are funding a rival super PAC to advocate for tighter regulations on Frontier AI Labs. It's a rival, of course, to all of the money that people like Greg Brockman, OpenAI executive, and others have put towards boosting AI and shutting down guardrails. This new Super PAC called Guardrails Alliance, catchy. It launched last month.

Zoë Schiffer: Sounds like an insurance plan.

Brian Barrett: It does. And not one that you necessarily want to for. It's like the only one that'll give you a mortgage. It launched last month with $5 million in initial funding. It bills itself as a populist effort by tech workers, labor unions, and other groups. And here's the key aspect. It's going to be a counterweight to that $100 million Leading the Future fund that we talked about a second ago.

Zoë Schiffer: Right. The way you said five million, it was like five million was a lot. And I was like, it seems like it.

Brian Barrett: I'm trying to hype up, I mean, they need—it’s Guardrails Alliance. They need a little bit of a boost.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, no, they do. I have been kind of waiting for this moment, I will say, since we found out that Greg Brockman was donating so much money to MAGA and Trump related causes in his view and Maxwell Zeff, reporter, has reported on this pretty extensively. It's really all about boosting AI and AI policy. And I think his view and the view of many others in the industry is that Trump and those aligned with him are more favorable toward a growth at all costs, AI first policy agenda. But if you've talked to any average researcher, overwhelmingly the companies are filled with younger employees who are pretty liberal. And so that tension felt potentially really messy to me. And OpenAI still has a culture where people are willing to push back and speak out. If you look at their Slack, it has that earlier tech feel of people really working out the problems in public, even though this stuff does tend to leak so much. At the same time, the composition of the company is really changing. There are these newer employees that have been brought in over the past year or two. I've heard some employees call them the MAGA blondes. I honestly don't even know if they are blonde or MAGA oriented, but I think there's this feeling that OpenAI is really changing, and there is the Trump aligned contingent. And then there's the more liberal contingent.

Leah Feiger: Look, this is so much to me the grassroots versus the billionaire, but