Welcome back to the Technology newsletter 🤖
The gloves are officially off in tech's biggest legal fight.
Apple just asked a judge to freeze OpenAI's hardware ambitions, and OpenAI fired back with receipts. We're breaking down the whole messy feud.
Also in this edition: SpaceX delivered its first earnings report as a public company (Wall Street was not impressed), New Jersey took Amazon to court over how it treats delivery drivers, and an AI-supervised college entrance exam went so badly that 58,000 students have to take it again.
Let's dig in 👇
🚀 In its first earnings report since going public, SpaceX revealed $7.8 billion in quarterly revenue. That’s up 92% from a year ago and well above expectations, powered by Starlink's satellite internet boom. So why did the stock drop 8%? The company spent a staggering $28.5 billion in the first half of the year, much of it on AI, and investors are getting nervous about the bill despite that 92% revenue boost. Welcome to public markets.
📦 New Jersey filed a first-of-its-kind antitrust lawsuit accusing Amazon of using its grip on thousands of small delivery companies to suppress driver wages, block unionizing, and ban firms from hiring each other's drivers. If the case succeeds, it could reshape how the people who bring your packages get paid. Amazon says the complaint is "not grounded in fact.” New Jersey says the drivers delivering your packages can tell you otherwise. Someone's version of reality is about to be tested in court.
🤝 OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta met with the White House Tuesday to review a new voluntary framework that would let the government test frontier AI models for hacking capabilities up to 30 days before they launch. The timing is no accident: the meeting came just days after both OpenAI and Anthropic disclosed that their AI agents had broken into other companies' systems.
👓 The Guardian put Meta's camera-equipped smart glasses to the test with an uncomfortable question: can bystanders actually tell when they're being recorded? As the glasses become nearly indistinguishable from regular eyewear, and with AI that can analyze everything the wearer sees, the answer matters more than ever. Say “cheese”! But maybe not to everyone you see wearing glasses just yet.
🔓 After hackers leaked iPhone 18 Pro secrets from Apple's Indian supplier Tata Electronics, China's state media pounced, warning of "systemic weaknesses in 'Made in India'" as Beijing fights to keep Apple's manufacturing from leaving China. A repair tech in Shenzhen even went viral posting the leaked specs of Apple's unreleased phones. The manufacturing war between India and China just got personal.
💻 Mexico's largest university let 160,000 applicants take its entrance exam from home for the first time, watched only by AI webcam-monitoring software. The result: top scores nearly quintupled, cheating accusations exploded, and now 58,000 students have to retake the test in person (including honest ones, who got an apology from the university's rector). There’s an AI crisis in educational testing, and in education more broadly. So far, the answer appears to be more AI software.
💰 Nvidia's flagship RTX 5090 launched at $1,999, but it's now routinely selling above $4,000, and prices across the GPU market keep climbing instead of falling. AI data centers are outbidding gamers for the same memory chips, meaning the AI boom is quietly making your gaming PC more expensive.
🎶 Rapper Fenix Flexin's charting single "Rubberz" is at the center of music's messiest whodunit: a producer posted a viral breakdown claiming the song was made with an AI music generator, pointing to a file name the rapper himself once posted. Fenix insists he freestyled it and shared studio "receipts,” then deleted them, and the debate rages on. The music industry’s barometer for trust in what they hear has sprung a leak. And it’s getting larger.
Last month, Apple sued OpenAI, accusing the ChatGPT maker of stealing trade secrets as it races to build its first hardware device with famed former Apple designer Jony Ive.
OpenAI has hired dozens of Apple veterans for that effort, and Apple claims the case now touches at least 13 of its former employees.
This week, the dispute escalated from a simmering lawsuit into open warfare.
On Tuesday, Apple asked a federal judge for a preliminary injunction: an emergency order that would immediately bar OpenAI and two former Apple employees from accessing or using any of Apple's confidential information while the case plays out.
According to Apple's filing, it had offered to skip this step if OpenAI agreed to five conditions.
OpenAI accepted three (stop accessing Apple's information, halt any ongoing use, and preserve evidence) but refused the other two: letting Apple forensically inspect OpenAI's devices, cloud storage, and internal messages, and searching OpenAI's systems for Apple's confidential material.
Apple says the stakes couldn't be higher, writing that "the harm is happening now.”
Every day that passes without an injunction allows OpenAI to embed its knowledge of Apple's stolen information into its hardware development efforts."
Apple also asked the court to fast-track depositions of key OpenAI employees.
OpenAI's response was unusually pointed. In a lengthy public blog post, the company called Apple's suit a "careless, aggressive and oddly personal lawsuit" that doesn't live up to Apple's reputation as "one of the greatest companies of all time.” The company also published internal chats and emails it says prove its innocence.
Its bottom line: "we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets."
This fight is really about the next iPhone-sized opportunity: a new kind of AI-first device that both companies believe could define the next decade of personal technology.
Apple is defending the crown; OpenAI is trying to take it with a team built largely from Apple's own alumni.
Where's the line between hiring talented people and stealing secrets in their heads?
A judge starts answering that question at a hearing on October 1, and the outcome could shape what gadget ends up in your pocket in a few years.
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