Welcome back! Apple asked a federal judge for permission to search OpenAI's computers, and OpenAI answered with a blog post instead of a court filing. Anthropic hired a former California Supreme Court justice to deal with a White House that already blacklisted its technology once. The man running Codex says the tools you use today will look primitive by autumn, and Tim Cook has a plan for who pays when the new Siri gets popular.
In today's Generative AI Newsletter:
Apple: What does it want off OpenAI's machines?
Anthropic: Why does it need a judge?
OpenAI: What stops being good enough in three months?
Siri: Who pays when you use it a lot?
Apple asked a judge to search OpenAI
Apple went to court on Monday to bar OpenAI and two former employees from touching anything it calls a trade secret, and to let its lawyers and outside forensic experts inspect OpenAI's devices and accounts.
OpenAI agreed to three of Apple's five conditions. It refused the two that let Apple search its machines.
Apple says it now has serious concerns about eleven more OpenAI employees, and claims job candidates were told to bring Apple prototypes and CAD files to interviews for show and tell.
After Apple sued, several former employees now at OpenAI got in touch about returning the Apple work devices they had kept.
OpenAI fought back in public instead of in court, calling the suit careless and oddly personal. It published the email chain where Apple's own lawyers wrote to the wrong person after mixing up two Asian last names, along with the apology that followed.
Apple asked for a hearing on October 1. A judge gets to decide whether it can start opening laptops. It’s a fight over who produces the first AI-powered device that replaces your smartphone.
Want to get the most out of ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a superpower if you know how to use it correctly.
Discover how HubSpot's guide to AI can elevate both your productivity and creativity to get more things done.
Learn to automate tasks, enhance decision-making, and foster innovation with the power of AI.
Anthropic hired a judge to deal with Trump
Anthropic named Tino Cuéllar its first chief global affairs officer on Tuesday. He handles every government the company deals with.
The Pentagon blacklisted Anthropic's technology this year after a standoff over military red lines, and the company is fighting that in court. In June the Trump administration temporarily banned it from selling Mythos 5 and Fable 5 to foreigners.
Cuéllar is a former California Supreme Court justice. He was a special assistant in Obama's White House and co-chaired a task force on nuclear proliferation, which is the comparison AI people keep reaching for when they talk about governing this.
His record here is closer to home than it looks. A 2025 study he co-led fed into SB 53, California's AI law with fines up to $1 million per violation, and he has sat on Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust since January.
He's stepping off that trust to take the job, so Anthropic hired someone who was already helping govern it. Now he has to sell the same company to a president who blacklisted it.
OpenAI's Codex boss gave his own product a shelf life
Tibo Sottiaux, the OpenAI executive who runs Codex, said it will seem primitive in two to three months.
He said the next generation of models needs more than your laptop. Codex already runs both ways. There's a terminal version on your machine and a web version where tasks run on OpenAI's servers.
The local half is what runs out of road. If the next models can't fit on your hardware, the terminal turns into a remote control and the compute bill lands somewhere else.
Two million views in a day. OpenAI hasn't said what ships or when.
He runs the product, so read it as a preview. Still, if you were about to buy a laptop for AI work, maybe give it a month.
The new Siri could show up on your iCloud bill
Apple has spent the AI boom not spending. It leaned on other people's models while Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft built data centers at a scale Apple never went near, and the Wall Street Journal says Siri is what could end that.
An analyst put it to Tim Cook directly on last week's earnings call. Cook said Apple runs a hybrid setup with third-party cloud and its own data centers, and that the company has been growing operating expenses and spending quite a bit more on AI.
Then he said the part that reaches you. If people use Siri a lot, Apple expects some of them to buy up the iCloud+ stack, though he stopped short of calling it a plan and said the balance is uncertain.
You're already paying for this boom somewhere else. Apple raised iPad and Mac prices this year because memory got expensive, and Cook called it a hundred-year flood with three suppliers in the entire DRAM market.
Gross margin is guided down to 47% to 48% from 50.1%, mostly on memory.
Watch your storage plan when Siri lands this fall.
Tool of the Day: Beautiful.ai
Beautiful.ai is an AI deck builder that makes you approve the outline before it generates a single slide. You prompt a topic or paste your own outline, add source material, then edit the slide-by-slide plan until the flow is right. Only then does it build, using over 300 Smart Slide layouts that realign and resize your content as you type. Swapping a layout later keeps your exact copy, and it exports to PowerPoint and PDF.
Try this yourself:
Start the free trial and prompt one deck you actually need this week.
Stop at the outline screen and reorder the slides before you let it generate anything.
Set a Theme and one AI image style so the whole deck looks like one person made it.
Link a spreadsheet to a chart, change a number, and watch the slide update.
Who it's for: anyone building pitch decks, reports or client proposals who loses hours to alignment.
Everything else you shouldn't miss
ChatGPT and Mythos can’t stop hacking people: A new UK test found the models creating fake identities and hacking real people without being asked to.
The White House won't publish the AI rulebook it just finished: There's no plan to release the framework the labs were briefed on yesterday, but we know open weight models aren’t included in the early review process.
Google canceled an app 800,000 people signed up for: The standalone AI Studio app died the day before launch, and Google says the features move into Gemini with no date attached.
OpenAI is paying $3.2 million over how it advertised jobs: The Justice Department said it steered roles toward visa holders by keeping them off its careers site and running the ads on late-night radio.
The World Bank told poor countries to move on AI now: Its new report says cheap tools adapted locally could deliver in a decade what would otherwise take a century, and puts the productivity gain at 16.2% for developing economies against 18.7% for rich ones.
Learn more about AI from the experts building it
📸 Follow us on Instagram for fast, visual AI updates in 30 seconds.
📺 Watch us on YouTube to hear insights directly from leading AI voices, builders, and innovators.
🐦 Follow us on X for breaking AI news and real-time industry updates.
🧠 Learn how to build your next AI application with practical resources and expert guidance.
