Tesla is asking a federal judge for emergency access to a supplier’s plant in Troy, Texas, so it can haul out the tooling it needs to keep building the Cybertruck.
The supplier, Angstrom Automotive Group, is closing the plant and won’t let Tesla in. Tesla says that without those dies, several thousand Cybertrucks already committed to customers don’t get built.
Joe Rossignol (PDF):
The complaint alleges that Apple violated California’s Consumers Legal Remedies Act and other laws by failing to adequately review and monitor apps distributed through the App Store, despite marketing it as “a safe and trusted place to discover and download apps.” Due to these assurances in Apple’s marketing, the complaint said the plaintiffs trusted that a Sparrow Wallet app they downloaded from the App Store on iOS was legitimate, when in reality it was a fraudulent spoof designed to steal Bitcoin from users.
Sparrow Wallet is only available on Windows, macOS, and Linux. The popular Bitcoin wallet is not available on iOS, but scammers have released fake lookalike apps in the App Store that can trick users into giving up control of their funds.
[…]
Even when victims reported fraud, the lawsuit alleges that Apple often took little to no action, and it says other fake Sparrow apps remain in the App Store.
Sparrow Wallet developer Craig Raw has publicly addressed Apple’s slow response to multiple fake versions of his app appearing in the App Store. In a January 2024 social media post, for example, he said “there is still a scam ‘Sparrow Wallet’ app on the @Apple App Store, despite myself and others having reported it weeks ago.”
My attempt to protect users from scam apps on the @AppStore has gotten my Apple Developer account flagged for termination - ironically, for “dishonest activity”.
[…]
I’m the developer of the real Sparrow Wallet, a desktop app, and I hold the registered US trademarks for the name and logo. I have publicly warned @Apple and the community about these fake apps from early 2024, but they keep appearing.
The app @Apple flagged was a placeholder that was never published. Its only purpose was to warn users that Sparrow is desktop-only and that other “Sparrow” apps aren’t mine. This approach may have been misguided, but there was nothing dishonest about it.
In response to our request for comment, Apple said it has taken swift action to remove any apps impersonating Sparrow Wallet[…] Apple says it takes immediate action against apps that do not comply with its guidelines.
Previously:
Update (2026-07-28): Sarah Perez:
The complaint targets one of Apple’s longtime competitive arguments: that its tight control over its App Store makes its platform safer than those offered by its rivals. The company has used this claim to push back against deregulation of the app ecosystem, including third-party app stores and sideloading.
“As part of a sustained marketing campaign, Apple has positioned itself, its products and services, as offering a level of security and trustworthiness superior to any competing technology company,” the new filing states. “This includes assurances about the safety of applications distributed through its App Store. By retaining exclusive control over which apps are permitted on Apple devices, Apple has structured its platform to ensure that consumers depend entirely on its promise of safety and reliability,” it reads.
With third-party app stores, there would be an incentive to do better vetting than Apple, and with sideloading it would be clear that the app was not being downloaded from sparrowwallet.com.
Update (2026-07-29): Jeff Johnson:
What struck me about Apple’s response is that it places the burden of curating the App Store on developers and users rather than taking responsibility for it. After all, Apple reviews every version of every app before it can be published to the App Store. If Apple is curating the App Store, then why do scams have to be reported and removed? One wonders how the scams get past Apple review in the first place, and even if Apple review “is not perfect” (a gross euphemism), how the second line of defense, Apple employees patrolling the App Store for scams that the review team missed, also fails. The burden of App Store curation should not fall to me, a lone indie developer.
Apple’s response also ignores that the indie developer did report the scams, multiple times.
Previously:
Tesla has confidentially settled with three of the five named plaintiffs in the racism lawsuit that has been hanging over its Fremont factory since 2017.
That doesn’t end much. Up to 580 Black workers are still suing over conditions at the same plant, and California’s civil rights agency is taking its own case to a jury.
AP (Hacker News):
A federal judge has approved a $1.5 billion copyright settlement in which artificial intelligence company Anthropic will pay thousands of authors about $3,000 per book after using pirated copies of their works to train its Claude chatbot.
[…]
Bestselling thriller novelist Andrea Bartz first brought the suit with two other authors in 2024. It’s the first major settlement in dozens of AI copyright lawsuits that are still working their way through courts.
Somewhat ironic given recent claims from Anthropic about others training their AI on its work.
Previously:
Apple’s requests to overturn a $634 million patent verdict and secure a new trial in its long-running legal battle with Masimo were denied.
There doesn’t appear to be any other path for appeal or recourse, as the judge rejected both requests for either a new judgement or trial.
[…]
In the end, Masimo didn’t succeed in getting the Apple Watch banned or fundamentally redesigned. It won an empty victory with the funds it will be paid, and the patents affecting the lawsuit will expire in 2028 and 2029 anyway.
Although the ruling confirms the financial penalty, it does not affect current Apple Watch users. The smartwatch’s blood oxygen monitoring feature remains available after Apple introduced a software update in January 2024 that allowed sales to continue despite earlier legal challenges.
Previously:
Jason Koebler (tweet, Reddit):
The AI music generation tool Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, as well as from the stock music libraries Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, the International Music Score Library Project, and podcasts via RSS feeds, according to a hacker who breached the company and shared data about Suno’s training libraries with 404 Media. The hacker was also able to access user information for hundreds of thousands of Suno’s customers, as well as Stripe payment information, they said.
[…]
As part of these legal proceedings, Suno previously admitted that it was trained on “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet,” which included a total of “tens of millions of recordings.” Suno has been making the argument that it is allowed to train on copyrighted works as fair use in those cases, one of which has been settled.
Suno has long acknowledged that its AI music generator relied on the scraping of millions of songs available across the internet, but a new hack reveals just how the company pulled from streaming services and websites[…] all while user information remained vulnerable.
[…]
“Our goal has always been to help people create original new music, not replicate someone else’s. That’s why we build our models around what we call ‘Original Creation, By Design,’” the spokesperson said in a statement. “For example, we intentionally do not use artist names as a category of training metadata because we want our models to help people create brand new songs, not music that replicates other artists’ existing work. It’s also why we built Suno with detection filters that block or prevent a user from using specific artist, song, or album names as prompts, and prevent users from uploading lyrics or sound recordings that match existing works.”
Previously:
Sarah Perez (PDF, Hacker News, MacRumors):
The iPhone maker alleges that this misconduct, which it says reveals a pattern of theft from OpenAI employees who previously worked at Apple, was directed by OpenAI’s senior leadership, including Chief Hardware Officer Tang Tan.
The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accuses Tan of using Apple’s confidential project code names during OpenAI’s recruiting process, asking job candidates to bring in Apple hardware components to their interviews, coaching departing Apple employees on how to evade the company’s security procedures, and asking for details about the company’s unannounced products.
Apple’s allegations are detailed and shocking, and it sounds like they have a lot of evidence.
The lawsuit names Chang Liu and Tang Tan as two of the defendants. Tang Tan served as VP of product design at Apple, leading iPhone and Apple Watch product design. He departed the company in February 2024 to work with Jony Ive. Chang Liu, meanwhile, worked at Apple for eight years and was a senior system electrical engineer before departing to join OpenAI in January 2026.
Apple’s lawsuit also names OpenAI and io Products as defendants.
OpenAI’s hardware efforts are being led by Jony Ive, Apple’s former chief design officer.
[…]
Ive, Hankey, and Cannon are not personally mentioned anywhere in Apple’s initial filing today.
Here are the most surprising claims in Apple’s 41-page filing.
OpenAI’s Director of Strategic Communications, Drew Pusateri, took to X to comment on the company’s behalf.
In his post, he claims OpenAI has “no interest in other companies’ trade secrets,” adding that OpenAI remains “focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.”
This seems like a weak response, given that Apple says it reported its findings to OpenAI in February and never heard back. Presumably, they’ve already investigated but see the situation as serious enough that they need to say as little as possible.
It’s not clear to me the extent to which Apple believes the behavior was limited to the named defendants. It’s hard to believe that the rest of OpenAI’s leadership—including Altman and Ive—were unaware, given the scale of their recruiting from Apple. It’s equally hard to believe that they were aware and thought they could get away with it. I guess little from Altman would surprise me at this point. I’d like to believe that Ive wasn’t part of it, but then are we to believe that his former coworkers all kept him in the dark?
What is immediately notable about this whole thing is the myriad conflicts of interest. Apple, of course, has a current partnership with OpenAI to power Apple Intelligence features, something repeatedly mentioned on the previous version of its marketing webpage, and conspicuously absent on the current one.
But the history runs far deeper. Among the defendants in the suit is io Products — do not blame me for that capitalization choice — founded by Jony Ive and acquired by OpenAI last May. Total mentions of “Ive” in the body of this lawsuit? Zero. Also, one of the investors in Ive’s company was Emerson Collective, founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, and which now has equity in OpenAI. Neither Emerson nor Powell Jobs are defendants.
It all reads a bit as if Apple has been building up evidence of these allegations for some time and recently got their smoking gun. It’s not just nebulous “trade secrets” either, there are specific mentions down to “metal finishing techniques” that Apple apparently invented and protected.
It also comes a little less than a month after OpenAI was rumored to be threatening Apple with a lawsuit over the perceived failure of their deal to bake ChatGPT into the iPhone. As I wrote at the time, even just that threat was clearly not going to go over well in Cupertino.
Footnote 13 on p. 15 states:
Apple and OpenAI have a commercial relationship involving the integration of OpenAI’s ChatGPT into Apple Intelligence. The companies have entered into a written agreement governing that integration. That agreement is not at issue here. OpenAI’s acts of trade secret misappropriation alleged herein do not arise from and have no connection to that agreement.
Be that as it may legally speaking, in practical terms it seems untenable for that Apple Intelligence partnership to continue after this.
All that bubbling-under-the-surface tension between Apple and OpenAI is now out in the open!
Namely, while Apple frames OpenAI – or at least its fledgling hardware division – as “rotten to its core” (interesting terminology!), they really only have a case against two and maybe three individuals. But they also clearly believe that if this case goes to trial, they will have a case against a lot more.
[…]
The parallels to the Anthony Levandowski situation after he left Google for Uber have been drawn.
[…]
It is interesting that Apple is not suing Yu-Ting “Alyssa” Peng, who is named in the suit as a co-conspirator with Liu while she was still employed at Apple, before she also subsequently went to work at OpenAI. Is it possible she’s cooperating or has cooperated with Apple in this investigation?
[…]
Even if these allegations are found to be untrue or embellished, can he reasonably stay at OpenAI now? And perhaps that’s the real outcome Apple is looking for here, as they clearly frame him as the ringleader of the 400-plus people who have come over to OpenAI from Apple.
OpenAI’s ambitions to build a hardware rival to the iPhone are already running into trouble because of Apple’s trade secret lawsuit, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who argues the damage is showing up well before any court ruling.
[…]
The scale of the talent drain is a major part of why this matters to Apple. More than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI, including former Apple design chief Jony Ive, and Gurman says the company poached so heavily from Apple’s iPhone product design group specifically that Apple had to rebuild parts of the team. Apple has responded with bigger retention bonuses and executives personally working to keep engineers from leaving.
OpenAI stole stuff? I can’t believe it! I thought they were done with stealing after they stole literally everything on the internet.
I’m sure there’s no problem with sending this company all your source code they pinky swear not to train on.
I can’t believe this awful company solicited confidential information and stolen trade secrets, hiring from this other company while pretending to partner with them. ‘Rotten to the core’ indeed
😛
He’s referencing Apple doing this to Masimo. And, of course, Steve Jobs himself directed Apple to engage in illegal hiring practices.
Previously:
Update (2026-07-17): See also: Dithering.
Tim Hardwick (FT, Hacker News):
Apple has reportedly sent legal letters to dozens of former Apple employees now working at OpenAI, telling them to preserve potentially relevant documents and communications as it continues to pursue its trade secret lawsuit against the AI company.
Update (2026-08-06): Hartley Charlton (PDF):
OpenAI has asked a federal judge to dismiss Apple’s lawsuit accusing the AI company of stealing trade secrets, calling the allegations “meritless.”
Previously:
Apple’s challenge against the EU’s designation of its App Stores and iOS platform as “gatekeepers” was dismissed by Europe’s top court on Wednesday, reports Reuters.
[…]
The company also disputed the classification of iMessage as a number-independent interpersonal communications service, or NIICS, which would subject the app to EU telecoms rules. But the General Court said Apple’s actions regarding the iMessage service are inadmissible.
Back in 2023, Apple acknowledged that it qualified under the then-new definition of being what the EU called a gatekeeper service. But key to that is the size of the operation, and since 2024, Apple has been claiming it runs five smaller App Stores rather than one large one.
[…]
“Irrespective of the devices in question,” ruled the judges, “those stores have the same purpose, namely to connect app developers with end users in order to facilitate the distribution of software applications.”
Apple disagreed with the decision but didn’t say yet if it would appeal. “We firmly believe the DMA’s mandate goes beyond what is lawful and proportionate, threatening to erode decades of privacy and security protections we’ve built and leaving our users vulnerable to new risks,” an Apple spokesperson said in a statement to multiple outlets. “We will continue advocating for the innovation and privacy our European customers deserve.”
Apple still has two cases pending with EU courts. The first is a challenge to the EU Commission’s decision last year forcing Apple to open iOS to third-party developers, and the second is an appeal against the €500 million fine imposed in April last year for anti-steering violations.
Previously:
Joseph Cox (MacRumors, Hacker News):
A vulnerability in Apple’s “Hide My Email” tool lets almost anyone discover a person’s real email address that is supposed to be hidden by the feature, and Apple has failed to fix it for more than a year, according to a security researcher and 404 Media’s own tests.
[…]
“Apple Hide My Email is leaking email addresses that are supposed to be hidden. We reported the issue and replication instructions to Apple over a year ago. We don’t know why it hasn’t been fixed, but we don’t feel comfortable waiting any longer. Hide My Email users deserve to know that it may be possible for attackers to discover their hidden email addresses,” Tyler Murphy, the co-founder of EasyOptOuts, which discovered and reported the issue to Apple, told 404 Media.
“Free, publicly accessible people-search sites make it easy to link an email address to other personal details, so people relying on Hide My Email for safety may be at risk,” Murphy added.
[…]
To test the issue I generated a new Hide My Email address and provided it to Murphy. Around five minutes later, he replied with my real email address linked to my Apple account which was supposed to be hidden.
Murphy said that he reported the issue to Apple in June of last year, and the company told him it was looking into it. Apple said it had been fixed in March of this year, but Murphy found that wasn’t the case. He again contacted Apple, with the company saying that it would appreciate him not revealing the existence of the flaw until it had been resolved.
Apple then said it planned to address the issue in June, but since it still hasn’t been fixed[…]
March 19, 2026: Using the reproduction instructions from our initial report, we determined that the vulnerabilities hadn’t been fixed.
May 22, 2026: We realized that the vulnerabilities may have greater severity and scope than we thought initially and reported this to Apple. Apple never acknowledged the report of increased severity.
June 30, 2026: Apple again reported that the vulnerabilities were fixed and asked us to verify. We determined that the vulnerabilities hadn’t been fixed.
This is every fucking Feedback I file.
Not good. Especially the “We reported the issue and replication instructions to Apple over a year ago” part.
This is becoming a pattern. At least Apple still allows third-party e-mail providers.
Very few details are available right now. I have seen speculation that the original email address is revealed when someone replies using their hidden email address, but the impression I get from Cox’s reporting is that no user interaction is necessary[…]
[…]
I am also unclear about how, as of May, the EasyOptOuts guys found the “vulnerability may have greater severity and scope” than initially reported. Ominous, though.
Previously:
Update (2026-07-13): Jeff Johnson:
I don’t know whether I’ve accidentally stumbled upon that vulnerability, or perhaps in this case the Hide My Email user just messed up in some way, but I’ve definitely discovered a bizarre and troubling Hide My Email bug in Mail app (on macOS Sequoia 15.7.7).
[…]
Bizarrely, however, Mail app displayed an alert that I’ve never seen before, “This message was forwarded to you by Hide My Email,” despite the fact that I have previously received many emails from people using Hide My Email.
[…]
- Why I am seeing two different
@icloud.comemail addresses, one of which appears to be the sender’s unhidden address?- Why are the
To:andFrom:fields in my reply disabled?- Why is my reply not from my
@underpassapp.comemail address but rather displayed falsely as from the sender’s@icloud.comaddress and really from my unrelated Apple Account address?
Update (2026-07-16): Joe Rossignol:
Apple this week was sued over a reported “Hide My Email” flaw that could expose a user’s real email address. The proposed class action lawsuit alleges that Apple violated California’s false advertising law and other consumer protection statutes by knowingly offering a feature that does not work as advertised.
This is interesting in that the June 2025 bug report is the evidence that Apple “knew” the feature didn’t work, while “Apple continued to represent to consumers that Hide My Email would actually hide users’ email.” How long are they supposed to get to fix a bug?
Update (2026-07-20): Jeff Johnson:
The misleading user interface elements in Mail app are a bug, but by themselves they’re not a vulnerability. The vulnerability is that when I send a reply to my maliciously crafted email, my Apple account email address is disclosed in the “From” field of the sent reply! In other words, the Mail app interface lies, fails to show the true sent value of the “From” field.
There are a couple of crazy aspects to this information disclosure vulnerability:
- It does not require that the victim actually use Hide My Email! I never use it. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I don’t even have an
icloud.comemail account.- It does not matter which of the victim’s email accounts receives the email from the attacker. If your Apple account email address is
a@foo.com, but you receive a maliciously crafted email addressed tob@bar.com, Mail app will still send your reply froma@foo.com, thereby disclosing your Apple account address.
Update (2026-07-21): Juli Clover:
Apple addressed a vulnerability in Hide My Email that exposed a user's real email address, reports 404 Media. Apple told the site the issue was fully fixed in a patch released on July 3.
[…]
While the bug has now been addressed, email logs that pre-date the fix could still expose user email addresses.
Update (2026-07-22): See also: Hacker News.
It appears that the vulnerability I discovered, and which still occurs, is different from the vulnerability reported by others[…]
Cecilia Kang, Ryan Mac, and Eli Tan (March, Hacker News):
The social media company Meta and the video streaming service YouTube harmed a young user with design features that were addictive and led to her mental health distress, a jury found on Wednesday, a landmark decision that could open social media companies to more lawsuits over users’ well-being.
[…]
Citing features like infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendations, K.G.M. sued Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, and Google’s YouTube, claiming they led to anxiety and depression.
For its part, the Wall Street Journal editorial board is standing up for beleaguered social media companies in an editorial today criticizing everything about these verdicts, including this specific means of liability, which it calls a “dodge” around Section 230.
[…]
Product design, though, is a different question. It would be a mistake, I think, to read Section 230 as a blanket allowance for any way platforms wish to use or display users’ posts. (Update: In part, that is because it is a free speech question.) From my entirely layman perspective, it has never struck me as entirely reasonable that the recommendations systems of these platforms should have no duty or expectation of care.
Nick Heer, on an April Massachusetts lawsuit:
To me, a non-lawyer, much of the actual text of the ruling (PDF) explaining why this lawsuit was not immediately turfed on Section 230 grounds seems pretty reasonable. For example, the judge says “[u]nder the default settings, Meta enables approximately forty types of notifications” for the Instagram app, which the government alleges “is designed to overwhelm young users and compel them repeatedly to reopen Instagram”. We can argue whether this is a meaningful thing for a government to police or if it is just another example of Meta resorting to tacky growth-hacking techniques instead of trusting their product is sufficiently compelling on its own. (Most days when I open Instagram in my browser, it puts a red badge over the notifications tab and suggests I have one new follower. I do not; I never have. It lies to me every time, presumably because it knows most people, including me, will usually click on that, thereby increasing a number on a dashboard somewhere.)
couple weeks back, Jonathan Haidt published another entry in his ongoing campaign to convince the world that social media is inherently ruining kids’ lives. This one was a victory lap titled “Seven Lines of Evidence Against Social Media,” treating recent developments — including the social media addiction verdicts against Meta that most people are misunderstanding — as vindication of his thesis.
[…]
But then something inconvenient happened for Haidt’s thesis: Pew went and did a brand new study exploring teens’ experiences on TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. This one asked the kids themselves.
[…]
Indeed, the research repeatedly suggests that for the very small number of kids who are facing mental health problems and overrelying on social media in response, the answer is a targeted intervention to help those individuals — not a broad “ban kids from social media” program.
Previously:
A group of 48 China-based iOS developers have filed an antitrust complaint against Apple with the country’s market regulator over the App Store’s commission rates, the South China Morning Post reports.
The developers sent an open letter to China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), alleging that Apple failed to deliver on a promise to offer the lowest commission rate to the Chinese market. The group asked the SAMR to investigate and penalize Apple for allegedly abusing its market dominance to impose “unfair and excessively high” costs on local developers.
Apple lowered the fees in March but not as much as it did in Brazil and Japan.
Previously:
Allstate Insurance Company has accused Broadcom of haphazardly issuing audits against it because the insurance firm decided not to renew its contracts with VMware and CA Technologies.
The allegations were made in relation to a lawsuit that VMware filed against Allstate in December 2025, according to The Register. In the complaint, Broadcom alleges that Allstate failed to comply with license audits, which Broadcom claims its contract with Allstate requires.
In a June 12 filing, Allstate suggested that Broadcom issued the audits in response to Allstate deciding to end business with its companies. Allstate's statement reads:
© Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via Getty Images
T-Mobile is asking a New York court to rule that Broadcom was contractually obligated to continue supporting its VMware perpetual licenses.
In its complaint, T-Mobile said it has tens of thousands of virtual machines using VMware software across approximately 303,140 CPU cores. It also said that it was migrating off VMware but noted the time-consuming and technical challenges involved in migrating over 1,000 applications.
It filed its lawsuit, which was first reported by The Register today, in the Supreme Court of the State of New York in August 2025 (PDF).
© Getty Images | Anna Moneymaker
The family of a 76-year-old woman killed when a Tesla Model 3 crashed into her Katy, Texas, home has sued Tesla and the driver, alleging the company’s “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving” systems are defectively designed.
The wrongful death suit lands just days after the crash — and it leans on the same argument that produced last year’s landmark $243 million Autopilot verdict against Tesla in Florida.
Tesco, a retail conglomerate headquartered in the United Kingdom, is moving 40,000 server workloads off of VMware amid "abusive conduct" from Broadcom, recent legal filings claim.
Tesco filed a lawsuit in the UK’s High Court against Broadcom alleging breach of contract last year. According to a September report from The Register, the lawsuit claimed that in January 2021, Tesco bought perpetual licenses for VMware’s vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation, a subscription to VMware Tanzu, plus support services until 2026, with the option to extend support for four additional years.
But when Broadcom took over VMware in November 2023, it would not honor the deal and instead tried to get Tesco to pay “excessive and inflated prices for virtualization software for which Tesco has already paid” and would not allow it to buy support services for its perpetually licensed software without buying “duplicative subscription-based licenses for those same Software products," the initial complaint read, The Register reported at the time.
© Getty
Tesco, a retail conglomerate headquartered in the United Kingdom, is moving 40,000 server workloads off of VMware amid "abusive conduct" from Broadcom, recent legal filings claim.
Tesco filed a lawsuit in the UK’s High Court against Broadcom alleging breach of contract last year. According to a September report from The Register, the lawsuit claimed that in January 2021, Tesco bought perpetual licenses for VMware’s vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation, a subscription to VMware Tanzu, plus support services until 2026, with the option to extend support for four additional years.
But when Broadcom took over VMware in November 2023, it would not honor the deal and instead tried to get Tesco to pay “excessive and inflated prices for virtualization software for which Tesco has already paid” and would not allow it to buy support services for its perpetually licensed software without buying “duplicative subscription-based licenses for those same Software products," the initial complaint read, The Register reported at the time.
© Getty
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