You Brought a Knife to a Wolf Fight - Apple Accuses OpenAI of Trade Secret Theft

It's time for TWIT! This week at Tech, our favorite Frenchman is here, Patrick Bejaud from Le Bleu. Wesley Faulkner is also here, developer relations, and from Microsoft co-pilot Lou Mareska. Blockbuster News this week, Apple sues OpenAI. It could be a big one. We'll also talk about Meta. They say they could be fined as much as $1.4 trillion.

They're only worth $1.5. And yes, Anthropic did it again. Stay tuned. Twitter is next.

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slash US-26. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWIT. this is twit this week in tech episode 1092 recorded sunday july 12th 2026 you brought a knife to a wolf fight it's time for twit this week in tech the show we cover the week's tech news hello everybody great to see you and great to see our wonderful panel from paris france patrick

is here actually i'm in finland at the moment you went back and away i ran away from the heat and i'm this uh very old room of the house because my kids play the switch all day and uh i can't be on the computer next to them so i i fled both france you mean the nintendo switch 2 they play all day they do well not all day we are it's the holiday it's a vacation but still um but yeah they bring

their friends over they're loud so i'm in a closet essentially oh man which games are they uh playing i just started playing astroneer and uh what's that is that mila the mouse or whatever the digger mina the holower yeah me know the hour yeah we just tried uh yoshi's uh yoshi and the mysterious book it is wonderful they've always been a little bit uh a little bit like too kitty like the yoshi

games this one is really beautiful i reckon that explains it my seventh the seventh grader who lives down the street said that told me that so now we were comparing i don't know if it's i don't know if it's for you but it's for kids matthew said it's good so i'll give it a shot great to see you patrick wesley faulkner is also here from works not working although you could go to wesley 83.com

and find all of his works hello wesley hey it's good to be back good to see you oh we love having you on and i do owe you a thank you because you introduced me to the crazy man uh in fact now jeff atwood and i are doing a monthly show called i love the name by the way jeff out with the creator of stack overflow discourse and the coding horror blog so he's all about coding he decided

to name the show off by one. And it is definitely off. And he's the one that's off by. But it's a lot of fun.

He has crazy amounts of energy. Crazy. And the biggest heart. And he just, he's flying back from Berlin right now.

Yeah. Yeah, we are developers. I watched a stream of that just the other day. And it's just the same messages that we all need to take care of each other,

which I wholeheartedly believe in. Yeah. He's awesome. And if you look behind me, Jeff is watching us.

He's over our shoulder. Oh, my gosh. Also here, Lou Maresca. Lou and him.

Good to see you. Thanks for having me. Former host of This Week in Enterprise Tech. He's an engineering leader at Microsoft Copilot.

Yes, yes. Working on agent mode for Excel right now. It's getting very busy. Agentic Excel.

Yes. Ooh, that sounds so interesting. I give Lou credit for putting Python in Excel. I don't know if that's appropriate or inappropriate, but I think it was a good move anyway.

Yeah, yeah. We still use it a lot. Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's great to have all three of you.

Welcome to the show. We do have some Microsoft news, but let's start with kind of a blockbuster story that broke, I think, on Friday. Mark Gurman at Bloomberg had the breaking news. Apple is suing OpenAI for a trade secret theft.

It all started when one of the guys who was responsible for the iPhone, Tang Tan, vice president of product design, leading development of the iPhone, the Apple Watch, AirPods, and several other key Apple products,

left, abandoned Apple to go to become chief hardware. Wait a minute, hardware officer at OpenAI? OpenAI is not a hardware company, except that maybe they're planning on it. Apple alleges that Tang Tan brought his laptop with him, his Apple work laptop with him, including a bunch of key files.

This is a big lawsuit. Of course, OpenAI says they have no interest in other companies' trade secrets. It was funny. It did kind of trigger a back and forth Twitter war between Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Sam said, I guess our new Model 5.6 is pretty good. Elon's paying attention to me again.

He accused Sam of being a thief, always a thief. Once a thief, always a thief. It's actually been very entertaining. um we've seen these kinds of lawsuits before there's some concern that uh this could impact open ai's ipo which is imminent it could also and i would be unhappy about this affect whatever

hardware plans they have you remember they spent more than three billion dollars to bring