What Apple’s OpenAI lawsuit is really about

Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One out for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow none of them talk to each other. That's where Odo comes in. An all in one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets.

Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odo.com slash vox. That's ODO.com slash box. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nila Patel, editor and chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Hayden Field, the Virgist senior AI reporter, about the major trade secret lawsuit between Apple and OpenAI, and what this tells us about OpenAI's future.

For now, I'm sure most of our 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 and job interviews, and even downloaded files from Apple servers related to hardware manufacturing. The claims are shocking, although OpenAI denies them, and we have yet to see that company's legal response. Hayden has been covering OpenAI for years now, and she talked to a number of lawyers who specialize in intellectual property and trade secret law to get a sense of how serious this case is. And the answer is not entirely positive for OpenAI, which spent more than$6.5 billion to acquire legendary Apple designer Johnny Ives 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 that reputation up. Apple's big fight with Microsoft over the design of Windows in the 80s and 90s, all the way up to the billion dollar patent infringement saga with Samsung over Android in the early 2010s. Apple has gone to court for far less. But those cases were against companies at the scale of Microsoft and SAMSA.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (43 minutes, 8,552 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.