You can't sue your way to a product

Ben Thompson’s read on Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI is that the trade-secrets claim, whatever its merits against one departed employee, mostly reads as lashing out — the move of a company whose real problem is its own position in AI, not the people who left for a competitor. We don’t have a view on the litigation, and we’re a very small studio watching very large ones. But the underlying lesson is one we take seriously: you can’t sue your way to a product.

The companies we admire — the little Mac shops that have quietly shipped great software for twenty years — got there by making the thing, over and over, and letting the work argue for itself. When a company reaches for the courts to defend a position, it’s usually because it can no longer defend that position by shipping. That’s not so much a moral failing as a tell.

For us the takeaway is boring and durable: keep your advantage in the work, not in the legal department. The best protection for what you know how to build is to keep building it, faster and better than anyone who walks out the door. Everything else is a rearguard action.