400 hires and one laptop

Apple is suing OpenAI, IO Products, and two former employees over hardware trade secrets — an unreturned company laptop, confidential documents.

Two facts sit side by side in this case. The specific allegation is concrete: files taken on a company machine. But the complaint also notes that 400+ former Apple employees now work at OpenAI — and that isn't a scandal, that's the labor market.

Both can be true at once, which is what makes this genuinely hard. Companies hire senior people precisely for judgment built somewhere else, and that knowledge doesn't unload at the door. Somewhere between "what I learned" and "the file I copied" there's a line. I'm not sure the industry agrees on where it sits.

Precedent doesn't settle it. Anthony Levandowski took 14,000 files from Waymo, pleaded guilty, was sentenced to 18 months, and never served — the consequence that stuck was civil, a $179M judgment. Apple filed civil too.

If you've onboarded a senior hire from a direct competitor: what did you actually do about it?