Sam Altman may be the most controversial genius in Silicon Valley’s history.

Before Musk had even blasted him for turning a nonprofit into a money-making machine—people might have thought it was just Musk’s personal grudges.
But now Apple—the world’s most steady tech giant—has also stepped in to tear into him.
Apple accuses OpenAI of not just improper conduct by individual employees, but of miscoordination at the institutional level.
In short, OpenAI, starting from the top leadership, is allegedly systematically instigating OpenAI employees to get Apple staff to “sell” and make an escape.
That Tang Tan, who led the recruiting at OpenAI, is at the VP level at Apple.
Apple claims he not only teaches new teammates to bypass security reviews, but also circulates Apple’s internal departing security-process documents to everyone—seriously.
OpenAI’s response is very perfunctory, saying it has no interest in other people’s confidential information.
But those words look pretty thin in the face of the evidence.
Apple has produced download records, requests for physical components, and the interview process—each one hits right where it hurts.
With OpenAI’s valuation soaring to frightening levels and an IPO coming up soon, it desperately needs to prove it can build hardware that changes the world—like the iPhone.
But models built by brute-forcing compute are soft; hardware is hard.
If they try to take a shortcut, in the end they run straight into Apple’s legal Great Wall that it has built up over more than twenty years.
In Sam’s narrative, there’s always an arrogance that says anything is acceptable in order to benefit humanity.
But when your partners come knocking one after another—each bringing lawyers—that’s no longer a technical revolution; it’s a collapse of professional ethics.