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Apple’s suit against OpenAI under Tim Cook echoes a familiar playbook, betting that litigation can delay a rival from upending the iPhone era

Steve Jobs declared “thermonuclear war” on Google’s Android operating system in 2010, calling it a “stolen product.” Now, his successor is going to battle against Apple’s AAPL -0.28%decrease; down pointing triangle new and dangerous rival.

In one of his last acts as Apple’s chief executive before successor John Ternus takes over, Tim Cook fired a missile at OpenAI. In a lawsuit filed Friday, Apple alleged that a senior OpenAI executive, who once sat atop Apple’s own product design team, was involved in a monthslong campaign to steal Apple trade secrets.

Although it isn’t yet clear what evidence the company has to back up all its claims, the suit lands before OpenAI has released a product and as the technology industry races to build artificial-intelligence-powered devices that can move society beyond the smartphone era. The winner could dominate the future just as Apple’s iPhone has ruled the consumer market for the last 20 years.

“I am not afraid of Apple, but I have tremendous respect for them,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X Saturday.

Big tech rivals have long tried to supplant Apple, but thus far Google, Samsung, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon.com have all failed. Now, OpenAI is emerging as a new threat. It has built powerful AI models and is working toward an unspecified “family of devices” to run them, devices that could supplant Apple’s.

Apple’s innovation engine failed to develop hit AI products and features, leaving it vulnerable to new entrants. Its suit could be an attempt to throw sand in the gears at OpenAI, company observers say, to slow poaching of Apple staffers, for instance.

Friday’s lawsuit has echoes of the ones Apple filed against various Android ecosystem players beginning in 2010, a legal battle royal with hardware makers producing rival phones that played out over eight years.

The central allegation then as now was that a rival stole Apple’s innovations. Apple said Samsung “slavishly copied” the iPhone with smartphones it was already selling by the millions, which Samsung denied. The companies settled in 2018 after a long, costly battle.

At the center of each case Apple has pursued was a perceived breach of trust. Google’s then-chief executive Eric Schmidt sat on Apple’s board as his company developed Android. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product,” Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson.

Apple alleges in its new suit that “at every level…OpenAI has been stealing Apple’s trade secrets.” A more junior employee appeared to cross the line by using an Apple employee’s login to access Apple servers. But Apple also accused OpenAI’s hardware chief, Tang Tan, of soliciting trade secrets from its employees interviewing for jobs, and encouraging them to bring “actual parts” from Apple for “show and tell” sessions at OpenAI. Tan worked at Apple for 24 years, rising to vice president of product design.

But bringing parts to an engineering interview isn’t unusual, say people familiar with the tech hiring process. Interviewers want candidates to talk through their work. The question is whether the parts were sensitive, something Apple doesn’t offer evidence of and is seeking discovery to determine.

A spokesperson for OpenAI said, “We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets. We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.” Tan and a more junior employee, Chang Liu, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

At Apple, Tan worked very closely with Jony Ive, its famous industrial design chief. Ive left Apple to build his own design firm, later poaching Tan. OpenAI bought that company, io Products, in 2025 to spearhead its own device development efforts.

Bedfellows can become enemies very quickly in tech. OpenAI made the io acquisition—revealing its intention to wean consumers off smartphone screens—a year after announcing a partnership with Apple to integrate ChatGPT into some parts of the iPhone.

​The Wall Street Journal’s parent company, News Corp, has a content deal with OpenAI.

Bigger companies have so far failed to dent Apple’s dominance. Amazon’s Fire smartphone and Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating systems were both duds.

Mark Zuckerberg has failed to end-run the iPhone more than once, including his recent attempt to make an alternate tech ecosystem called the Metaverse, renaming and reorganizing his company around the idea. It hasn’t caught on. Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses are a popular new consumer device, but sales are a fraction of the iPhone’s.

Elon Musk has also chafed at Apple’s control of the digital economy. A unit of SpaceX is suing Apple for disadvantaging its AI app, and the company is now prototyping its own smartphone-like AI device. Apple has said that its App Store relies on algorithms and expert curation and doesn’t suppress rivals.

The irony of Apple’s case against OpenAI is that Apple itself has so frequently been accused of stealing other companies’ ideas that it has spawned a new verb, “sherlocking,” that is well-known in the tech world.

Apple is trying to catch up in AI. Its Siri chatbot got a long-awaited makeover that will be available to consumers in the fall. It wasn’t able to develop the new Siri AI itself, relying instead on Google to power it.

If the new Siri AI is free and has better functionality, will iPhone users keep paying for ChatGPT?

It also enjoys hardware advantages. Under the hood in each Apple device are powerful, Apple-designed chips capable of much more than just powering the new Siri. Apple already has billions of users carrying its devices, particularly the iPhone. Companies building the most sophisticated AI models, if they want to reach consumers, will likely have to go through Apple. And pay its toll.

Tech giants are borrowing even more than expected, weighing on bond prices

Wall Street is sending a message to tech companies engaged in a historic borrowing spree to fund investments in artificial-intelligence infrastructure: for pity’s sake, please slow down.

Over the past several weeks, the investment-grade corporate bond market has struggled to absorb a combined $75 billion of bond issuance from Nvidia NVDA 4.03%increase; up pointing triangle, SpaceX SPCX -4.51%decrease; down pointing triangle and Amazon.com AMZN -0.69%decrease; down pointing triangle. That marks a shift from earlier in the year, when investors were generally happy to hand money to so-called AI hyperscalers by any possible means.

While Nvidia and SpaceX were able to borrow at reasonably low interest rates, their newly issued bonds quickly slumped in the secondary market, disappointing investors who often like to flip such bonds. Amazon, meanwhile, had to pay unusually steep rates by its standards to complete its debt sale, reflecting investors’ newfound caution.

For the most part, those investors say they aren’t particularly concerned about the creditworthiness of the borrowers, or the sustainability of the AI infrastructure build-out. The problem instead is that they fully expect those companies to keep spending huge sums on chips and data centers for years—leading to hundreds of billions of dollars in new bonds flooding the market.

“Everyone knows there’s a lot more coming, and so I think there’s been a hesitancy to jump in with both feet here,” said Travis King, head of investment-grade corporates at Voya Investment Management. “Everyone wants to leave some room for the next deal.”

The recent weakness in hyperscaler bonds is a big deal for fund managers and investors, because investment-grade corporate bonds tend to be fairly stable. That means even modest price declines can make a major impact on a fund’s performance relative to its peers.

And it isn’t clear that hyperscalers are going to change their behavior anytime soon.

Typically, companies try to keep investors happy to ensure that their borrowing costs are as low as possible. But the hyperscalers are in such a heated race for computing power that they appear prepared to issue tens of billions of dollars of bonds at any moment, regardless of market conditions and whether they might need to pay higher interest rates.

“For us, it’s all we’re talking about, and for them it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, you know, we hit the bond market,’” said Ryan Jungk, investment grade corporate sector co-head at Newfleet Asset Management. “They don’t necessarily care if they’re flooding our market.”

Eventually, that could change, Jungk and other investors said. As borrowing costs rise, tech giants such as Amazon, Alphabet and Meta Platforms should be able to keep spending. But they could be pushed to issue more equity instead of debt.

Alphabet, for one, already announced in June that it would issue more than $80 billion in equity this year to help fund its AI investments. That, in theory, should have been good for its bonds. In reality, the boost was limited because investors read the issuance as a sign the company might spend even more on AI, requiring just as much borrowing.

Six companies that bond investors consider hyperscalers—Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Oracle, Nvidia and SpaceX—have already issued around $244 billion in bonds globally this year, according to Dealogic, up from $108 billion all of last year and $17 billion in 2024.

Investors entered the year knowing that hyperscalers were going to issue a lot of bonds. The extra yield, or spread, that investors demanded to hold the companies’ existing bonds over U.S. Treasurys had already increased accordingly, and demand was relatively strong for new bond sales during the first few months of the year.

As it turns out, however, companies are spending and borrowing even more than investors had anticipated. Many investors were especially caught off guard by Nvidia’s $25 billion bond sale in June and again last week by Amazon’s issuance of the same size, fueling a jump in bond spreads across all of the hyperscalers.

The spread of Alphabet’s 10-year bonds rose 0.12 percentage point last week, according to MarketAxess, while Meta’s 10-year bond spread climbed 0.16 percentage point. The average investment-grade bond spread ticked up only 0.02 percentage point, according to Bloomberg data.

As a first-time bond issuer, SpaceX has faced its own problems, with investors uncertain over how its bonds should be priced. The spread of its 10-year bonds has leapt nearly half-a-percentage point since being issued on June 23.

John Lloyd, global head of multi-sector credit at Janus Henderson, said his team has long believed that companies would spend more on AI infrastructure this year than the consensus estimate, leading them to hold fewer hyperscaler bonds than benchmark indexes.

Going forward, he said, “you still have a wide range of outcomes” for how much the companies will invest in AI, with high end estimates coming in north of $10 trillion over the next several years.

Moves in tech company bond prices are now especially important to portfolio managers, because those bonds make up an increasingly large share of benchmark bond indexes. If investors are spooked by the threat of further issuance, and go “underweight’ tech bonds, they could get burned if issuance is less than expected and the bonds rally.

Conversely, they could get hurt if they start buying up the bonds and issuance doesn’t let up.

“If you get the tech trade wrong, that probably makes or breaks your year,” said Jungk of Newfleet.

The fast-fashion retailer could list in Hong Kong as early as the third quarter of this year

Fast-fashion retailer Shein has cleared a key hurdle for its long-awaited Hong Kong initial public offering, winning China’s nod for a listing that people familiar with the matter said could see it valued at more than $40 billion.

Beijing’s approval came about a year after Shein confidentially filed for an IPO with Hong Kong’s stock exchange last summer.

A listing is expected to come together as early as the third quarter of this year, the people said.

Shein expects to issue 341.6 million H shares in the IPO, according to a statement from the China Securities Regulatory Commission on Friday.

Founded in the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing in 2012, Shein has become one of the world’s most popular fast-fashion brands by selling ultracheap, trendy apparel. Recently, the company has found itself caught in the crossfire of geopolitical tensions between China and the West, complicating its path toward an IPO.

Shein was initially looking at going public in the U.S., but the plan was derailed in 2024 amid U.S. scrutiny of its supply-chain and labor practices in China. The company later switched gears toward a listing in London, but that too became snarled in the flare-up of trade tensions between Beijing and Washington last year. President Trump’s tariffs and his administration’s move to end the so-called de minimis exemption for China, closing a duty-free loophole for low-value packages, dealt another blow to the fashion giant.

While Shein has no customers in China, it subcontracts thousands of factories in the country to produce its enormous selection of low-price merchandise and adapt to rapidly changing consumer tastes. Those operational ties are a major reason why its IPO plan needs Beijing’s blessing even though the company moved its headquarters to Singapore several years ago.

Ultimately, Shein failed to secure the nod for a London IPO from Beijing. People familiar with the matter said Chinese authorities also encouraged the company to list in Hong Kong.

Facing mounting external pressure, Shein has sought to repair and reinforce relationships at home, marking a tactical shift from its previous strategy to distance itself from its Chinese roots.

In a rare public speech in February, Sky Xu, Shein’s low-profile founder and chief executive, pledged to invest over 10 billion yuan, or around $1.5 billion, in strengthening its supply chain in China’s southern manufacturing hub of Guangdong, where most of its contract manufacturers are based.

Shein, which sells to more than 160 countries, has been diversifying its supply chain, working with factories in countries including Brazil and Turkey.

Valued at around $66 billion in a fundraising round in 2023, the company has seen its price tag steadily fall amid increasing competition from rivals such as Temu and persistent geopolitical uncertainty.

Its investors include General Atlantic, IDG Capital, Mubadala Investment and HSG.

Bloomberg and Reuters earlier reported some details about Shein’s Hong Kong IPO plan.

Abivax race — the field (scorecard attached), a rising price tag, and why AZN can’t be ruled out

Following on the AZN read-across: Soriot’s FT interview lays out the exact demand backdrop — “nearly $20bn of sales” going generic after 2030 and only “halfway to a target of launching 20 new medicines by 2030” — that keeps AstraZeneca in the frame for a de-risked immunology asset. But AZN is the outsider here, not the favourite, and the price to play just went up. I’ve put the full buyer field in the attached one-page scorecard (strategic fit vs. ability to fund a ~$20bn+ take-out, ranked most-to-least likely).

Abivax has been a named takeover target since JPM in January, when Eli Lilly was reported to be eyeing a ~€15bn ($17.5bn) deal. The tension across the field is that the best strategic fits and the deepest pockets aren’t the same names:

The €15bn/$17.5bn January number now looks like a floor for three compounding reasons: obefazimod’s Phase 3 maintenance data landed positive; the mid-year cancer-signal scare (stock -43% in early June) was largely walked back by end-June safety data (+36%); and — critically — Abivax just raised ~$920M to fund a solo US launch with runway to ~2029. That raise does two things to any bid: it adds cash to the equity bridge, and it removes the distressed-seller dynamic entirely. A buyer now has to pay a control premium over a company that has credibly said it doesn’t need one. Net effect: the realistic take-out has drifted from ~$17.5bn toward $20bn+.

What makes obefazimod expensive is a rare combination: genuinely first-in-class mechanism (oral miR-124 enhancer), Phase 3 de-risked, in a market as big as UC + Crohn’s (IBD heading for ~$27–31bn by 2030). The right precedents are the recent novel-mechanism IBD takeouts, not oncology:

Those two set the going rate for a de-risked, new-mechanism IBD asset at roughly $7–11bn — and both were injectable antibodies still short of full Phase 3. Abivax, at a rumored ~$17.5bn-and-rising, is being marked above that band, consistent with obefazimod being (a) oral rather than injectable and (b) further along. The TL1A comps don’t undercut the price — they frame why it’s higher.

Scanning for still-independent immunology assets with a comparable “novel MoA + late-stage + large TAM” profile, there aren’t many, and each is an imperfect match:

Bottom line: within immunology specifically, first-in-class + Phase 3 + IBD-scale TAM is genuinely scarce. The market has been paying $7–11bn for novel-target IBD antibodies (TL1A); Abivax pairs a novel mechanism with an oral profile in the same disease, which is exactly why its number sits above the precedents — and why any buyer, AZN included, has to stretch.

Full buyer-by-buyer ratings are in the attached scorecard (Abivax_Buyer_Scorecard.docx). Happy to firm up the exact net-debt/EBITDA per name before this goes further.

Best,

Laurent

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