When Apple slapped itself in the face: From Elon Musk's criticism to the 2026 lawsuit

In June 2024, while the whole technology world was admiring Apple Intelligence and the historic handshake with OpenAI, Elon Musk - who never misses an opportunity to mock his opponents - typed a harsh tweet: Apple is not smart enough to make AI itself, but is confident enough to ensure OpenAI will protect user data. “They are selling you out,” he wrote. At that time, most people saw this as just a familiar quarrel between two technology giants, an Elon Musk who always liked to dominate and an Apple who always remained silent and proudly moved on. Two years later, in July 2026, Apple continued to write that story — but in a completely different chapter, and ironically they were the ones who suffered the consequences. Apple officially filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the company and io Products - a hardware startup founded by former legendary design director Jony Ive and then sold to OpenAI for $6.5 billion - of stealing trade secrets "at all levels" to develop an AI device that directly competes with Apple's own ecosystem. Former employees who were in charge of Apple's hardware design and production process, after leaving, were accused of bringing a treasure trove of internal knowledge to their competitors.

Apple sues OpenAI: "theft of trade secrets" On July 10, 2026, Apple officially filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in the US Federal Court in the Northern District of California, accusing the company that created ChatGPT of stealing trade secrets through two of its former employees, and violating the signed contract. This is... Tinhte.vn Apple sued Open AI These two events, at first glance, have nothing to do with each other. On one side is the story of user data being exposed through an AI feature on the iPhone. On the other side is the matter of internal technology secrets being taken away by personnel. But if you look closer, both revolve around the same thread: trust. And more specifically, the price to pay when Apple — a company that is notoriously strict, controlling everything from chips to cases — chooses to bet too much on an outside partner that it has no real control over. In 2024, Apple believes OpenAI enough to assign them the role of handling the most private AI queries of hundreds of millions of iPhone users, in return for only a few layers of security commitments on paper and a "Private Cloud Compute" architecture that Apple itself drew up to reassure public opinion. Musk then criticized Apple for being naive not because he loved Apple users, but because he saw a paradox: a company that always preaches about privacy voluntarily opens its doors to a third party that it admits does not have complete control. By 2026, it turned out that the problem wasn't just about user data. It also lies in the people themselves. The fact that senior personnel, who hold Apple's core secrets, can easily switch to serving a partner — and then turn that partner into a competitor in just a few years — shows that the line between "cooperation" and "strategic risk" is thinner than Apple once thought. The company, which is famous for its notorious internal security, does not allow employees to discuss projects outside the scope of their team, revealed a large gap right where they choose to trust the most: the relationship with OpenAI and the people surrounding it.

Apple sues OpenAI: "theft of trade secrets"

Elon Musk's old tweet. For ordinary users, what is worth thinking about is not who is right and who is wrong in the lawsuit, but an old question is asked again: if even Apple - a company with the best resources, legal team and security apparatus in the world - does not foresee the risks when joining hands with OpenAI, then where is our data and information, ordinary users without our own lawyers, really located in that tangled chain of trust? Every time we click "agree" on an AI term of use, every time we let a virtual assistant read our messages or our calendar, we're making the exact same bet Apple made — except we don't have $6.5 billion or a team of lawyers to seek justice if things go wrong. Elon Musk may have been right in the most unexpected way: not because OpenAI is necessarily bad, but because anyone who puts too much trust in a party they have no control over — whether it's a trillion-dollar giant or an ordinary user typing a message to ChatGPT — may one day pay the price in ways they don't foresee.