Apple Sues OpenAI for Alleged Theft of Unreleased Technology; Musk and Altman Clash as GPT-5.6 and Grok 4.5 Launch

Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on July 10 in federal court in Northern California, accusing the company of soliciting Apple employees to disclose confidential information about unreleased products, components, design documents, and other proprietary data to support OpenAI's hardware development plans. Apple is seeking an immediate cessation of the conduct and destruction of all involved materials.

The lawsuit coincided with a heated public dispute between Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on July 11, with Musk accusing Altman of "taking fraud to a new level" regarding OpenAI's business practices toward users and customers. Both accusations emerged as OpenAI released GPT-5.6 and Musk's xAI launched Grok 4.5 in the same week, with both models targeting the AI Agent market for autonomous multi-step task handling.