Apple Sues OpenAI Over Trade Secrets as Meta Launches Spark 1.1

Apple sued OpenAI for trade secret theft this week. A six-year Apple employee allegedly walked physical prototypes out the door for show-and-tell, encouraged by a 24-year Apple veteran now running OpenAI’s hardware group, according to SaaStr.

Apple Lawsuit Targets OpenAI Hardware Ambitions

The lawsuit signals OpenAI’s hardware ambitions. Those ambitions appear increasingly like a distraction from coding, the activity actually generating revenue. The individuals involved face termination. Apple is furious that 400 of its people have gone to OpenAI and now has a discovery process to march up the chain.

California Law Removes Need for Theft

California does not enforce non-competes. The doctrine of inevitable disclosure means knowledge in an employee’s head travels with them legally. Anthropic is the proof case: founding employees left without taking a line of code because everything in their brains was already theirs.

Token Usage and Developer TAM Limits

ClickHouse’s AI spend is up 60x since February. The best developers now code 24 hours a day across 10 to 20 agents. There are only 1.8 million developers in the US and roughly $250 billion in total developer wages. If most of Anthropic and OpenAI’s enterprise revenue is coding, they may already be at 20% of the entire software labor market, according to SaaStr.

Meta Enters Price War with Spark 1.1

Meta re-entered the frontier race by launching Spark 1.1 and charging developers for its own models for the first time. Zuck broke a three-year silence on X to announce it. The launch is aggressively priced and aimed at the cheap-token tier. The open question is whether it is ever ROI-positive to be the fourth player selling at that price, according to SaaStr.