In praise of the free flow of human ingenuity

The American founding father Benjamin Franklin famously declared that “as we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others, we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously”. In that spirit, he declined to patent his own inventions, from bifocals to the lightning rod.

Some 250 years after the US Declaration of Independence, Silicon Valley should give thanks. Instead, its biggest companies regularly find themselves in ugly courtroom scraps over the theft of industrial secrets and the poaching of their finest minds.

The latest high-profile case pits iPhone-producing incumbent Apple against ChatGPT developer OpenAI, which has ambitions to become a hardware giant, after its 2025 acquisition of design studio io, co-founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive.

Apple’s lawsuit claims its rival has used former and current Apple employees to steal hardware designs as part of a “co-ordinated pattern of misconduct”. (Ive is not mentioned by name in the suit.) “OpenAI’s nascent hardware business [is] rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets,” the suit alleges.

Apple has also sent letters to some 40 former staff working at OpenAI, ordering them to preserve documents and meet Apple lawyers. Neither Apple, nor OpenAI, have commented on the letter campaign, though the AI lab has said it is not aware of “any evidence that [Apple’s] complaint has merit”.

Apple’s suit comes at a tricky time for OpenAI. The company and its chief executive Sam Altman are on the back foot about strategy, ethics and safety of the lab’s research and development. The lab’s admission this week that an AI agent escaped from a testing environment and hacked into a start-up adds to the pressure.

But the litigation also comes as Apple itself is under assault in one of the tech sector’s most costly wars for talent yet, with engineers switching sides at pace.

Free movement of skilled people…