Future Technology[Daily Briefing] Apple v OpenAI, SharePoint zero-day, oldest quasars
Apple takes OpenAI to court, and it is really about the engineers
Apple has sued OpenAI in a Northern California federal court, accusing it of trade secret theft at, in its own framing, every level of the company. The complaint points to more than 400 former Apple staff now at OpenAI, many pulled from its chip, hardware, and on-device AI teams.
The filing goes further than a hiring gripe. Apple alleges that OpenAI hardware chief Tang Tan, a former Apple vice president, told Apple staff interviewing at OpenAI to share secrets, that departing employees were coached on dodging security checks, and that one former engineer walked out with an Apple laptop. It is a sharp reversal for two firms that put ChatGPT inside the iPhone back in 2024, before OpenAI bought Jony Ive hardware startup and began building gadgets of its own.
Over the weekend the row spilled onto X, with Elon Musk amplifying the case and trading jabs with Sam Altman.
Why it matters: when a company sues over who its people used to work for, the fight has stopped being about products and started being about the engineers who build them. On-device AI is the prize, and Apple is signalling it will defend that ground in court, not just in the market.
Read more on Future Technology
Quick hits
Meta built its own AI chip. Meta custom data-centre chip, codenamed Iris, heads to production in September, made with Broadcom and TSMC, as it chases 14 gigawatts of compute by 2027. Why everyone wants off the Nvidia bill (TechStartups, 3 min read)
SK Hynix lands on Nasdaq with a record raise. The Korean memory maker pulled in about 26.5 billion dollars, the largest ADR offering ever, a sign of how scarce high-bandwidth memory has become. The memory bottleneck behind AI (TechStartups, 2 min read)
A SharePoint zero-day is under active attack. CVE-2026-45659 allows remote code execution with no password, CISA has added it to its exploited list, and the federal patch deadline has already passed. Patch guidance (The Hacker News, 3 min read)
Black holes from when the universe was a toddler. Astronomers spotted 31 of the oldest known quasars, two of them shining from just 670 million years after the Big Bang, which challenges how fast supermassive black holes could grow. More cosmic firsts (ScienceDaily, 4 min read)
Tool of the day: Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB)
If you take on one project this month, turn a Raspberry Pi 5 into an always-on home server. For a few watts it runs backups, network-wide ad blocking, a dashboard, and home automation, and the 8GB model has the headroom to do several at once. It is not the cheapest Pi any more, and you will want the official power supply and active cooling, but it is the most capable board they have made. Check price on Amazon, or read our full home server guide.
One question before you go: if you ran a big AI lab, would you build your own chips or keep paying Nvidia? Hit reply and tell me.
Nath, Future Technology
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