Courts Ruled Engineers' Thinking Stays Portable for 40 Years

Apple is suing OpenAI for allegedly stealing hardware secrets through former employees.

The complaint names specific engineers and IO Products, the hardware startup Jony Ive built that OpenAI acquired in 2025. On the surface this looks like routine corporate litigation—a legacy tech company protecting its IP from an upstart that hired its people.

But the real story is about narrative ownership, not law. In 1986, Intel hired several engineers who had worked at Digital Equipment Corporation, where they had spent years learning DEC's memory architecture and processor design philosophy—and DEC sued on trade secret grounds.

DEC lost. The courts ruled that what the engineers carried in their heads—their understanding of how memory systems worked, the design principles they had internalized—was not property. It was portable expertise. That ruling has held for nearly 40 years, surviving cases like Nvidia's hiring of ASML's optical engineers in the 2010s.

The lawsuit is not about winning. It is about planting doubt in the minds of people who write checks.

Apple will almost certainly lose on the merits. The engineers who left for OpenAI did not steal documents or code—they brought their knowledge of materials science, thermal design. Power efficiency, the kind of expertise that lives in judgment, not in files. Yet Apple filed anyway. The lawsuit's target is not the court. It is the investor community and the narrative about what OpenAI actually is.

If Apple can establish publicly that OpenAI needed Apple's secrets to build hardware, it damages OpenAI's credibility whether the court agrees or not. The lawsuit is not about winning. It is about planting doubt in the minds of people who write checks.

This matters because it shows how institutional power works when legal power stops working. When you cannot win the formal game, you change what counts as the audience. You lose the case and win the story. Watch how many stories now repeat Apple's language about "a pattern of theft" without interrogating whether any actual theft occurred. That is the real victory happening in real time.