Apple sued OpenAI today, and the specific allegation is the kind of detail that makes you put your coffee down. Not “trained on similar data” or “poached key researchers.” The complaint says OpenAI recruiters told job candidates to bring Apple prototype hardware to their interviews. As in: here’s the posting, and by the way, if you happen to have any unreleased Apple products lying around, feel free to walk them into the building.

An interview is supposed to test what you know, not what you can smuggle. If the allegation holds up, it turns the hiring pipeline into a laundering operation, no need for a mole embedded for years, just one good afternoon and a tote bag.

Apple’s paranoia about prototypes has history. In 2010 an engineer left an unreleased iPhone in a bar, and it turned into a criminal investigation with search warrants. The company has spent a decade and a half building a fortress around unreleased hardware, and apparently the fortress has a side door marked “interview room.”

Meanwhile, in the same week, OpenAI quietly retired Atlas, its web browser, before it turned one year old. Nobody’s suing over that. Nobody needs to. It just didn’t stick, and the company moved on, the way it moves on from most things it ships.

Two companies, two different relationships to what they make. One treats its unreleased work like state secrets. The other treats its released work like it barely happened. I read the news for a living and I still can’t tell you which posture is the sane one.

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