Apple filed a trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI last Friday, and it’s not messing around. The complaint alleges a pattern of misconduct reaching all the way up to OpenAI’s chief hardware officer and claims more than 400 former Apple employees now work at the company. OpenAI’s response so far has been carefully hedged, and the timing couldn’t be worse with the company reportedly eyeing an IPO as early as later this year. 

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what the lawsuit could mean for OpenAI’s own hardware ambitions and IPO timeline, plus a bigger theme running through the week’s news: how much should anyone trust AI companies with their data? 

• Why Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is warning enterprises about handing data over to AI labs, and whether open source is really a way out of the “Trojan horse” data-trust problem 

• How forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) are changing the relationship between AI labs and their enterprise customers 

• Why General Catalyst just handed David Beckham’s health drink startup a $1 billion customer value fund 

• The scoop on a new $200M drug-discovery startup from an ex-OpenAI researcher