Apple took OpenAI to a federal court in California and accused it of orchestrating a coordinated campaign to steal its artificial intelligence hardware trade secrets, as TechCrunch revealed. At the heart of the lawsuit is the hiring of more than 400 former Apple employees, with two names at the center: Tang Tan, now OpenAI’s top hardware executive, and engineer Chang Liu, whom Apple accuses of exploiting a software bug to download confidential files before leaving.
The lawsuit formalizes a rupture that had been brewing since OpenAI bought io Products, the hardware startup of legendary former Apple designer Jony Ive, for about $6.4 billion. Beyond the clash between two giants, the case is the clearest sign so far that the “talent war” between big tech companies and AI labs is shifting ground: from million-dollar offers to sign engineers to litigation over intellectual property. OpenAI responded that it has no interest in anyone’s trade secrets, but the precedent is already on the table, and it will probably be repeated as more AI companies build their own hardware.
For Latin America, where much of the technical talent is trained locally and then migrates to those same labs, the underlying question is what tools a country or company in the region would have today to protect technology and knowledge developed at home if a foreign actor decided to take them. The answer, for now, is far from obvious.
Also today
- Argentina debates the legal form of the “Automated Company” — The Senate is moving forward on regulating companies operated by autonomous AI agents, without granting them legal personhood, and opens the debate over who is liable with their assets when a machine makes the decisions.
- A column warns of the region’s silence on US AI export controls — The contrast is with the European Union, which reacted quickly in terms of technological sovereignty to the same precedent.
In the region
The weekend brought no formal regulatory moves, but it did bring two signs that the Latin American debate on AI is maturing through ideas. In Argentina, the legislative progress of the “Automated Company” (companies operated by autonomous AI) puts on the table a question almost no country has resolved: how financial liability is assigned when decisions are made by a system and not by a person. In parallel, voices are being raised warning about the absence of a coordinated political response from the region to US AI export controls, in contrast with how quickly Europe moved to defend its technological sovereignty.
Threads we’re following
That second point connects to a story we have been following: in recent weeks, Washington debuted the ability to suspend frontier AI models through export controls, and it became clear that Latin America had no seat in those decisions or in the global forums where they are discussed. Today’s column presses on the same gap from another angle (the lack of a common regional stance) and suggests that the problem is not temporary but structural: the region keeps consuming rules that are written elsewhere.
If litigation ends up becoming the playbook for the next stage of the AI competition, what legal instruments does the region have today so that its talent and its technology are not simply raw material for others?
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Doble Click is written with Anthropic models.