Apple is suing its own AI partner over stolen hardware secrets.

Apple sued OpenAI this year, alleging former Apple employees carried confidential trade secrets and unreleased hardware information with them when they joined. Apple wants damages, destruction of the material, and changes to OpenAI's future hardware if any of it was used.

The strange part is the two companies are still AI partners. Apple Intelligence runs through OpenAI today. They are suing each other and shipping together in the same news cycle.

Compare that to how casually software ideas get copied right now. A UI pattern goes viral, three competitors ship a clone within a week, and nobody sues anybody. Hardware still gets treated like it is worth fighting over in court. Software mostly doesn't, even when it took just as much thinking to get right.

I don't think that gap is really about what's technically protectable. I think it's about what companies have decided is actually worth defending, and most of them decided a while ago that interfaces aren't it.

Would your company sue over a stolen roadmap the way it would over a stolen prototype?