Judge Davila lets Apple depose OpenAI's hardware chief and read its interview files early

Any checklist or script that OpenAI's hardware recruiters used with an Apple candidate is now on a court-ordered production list ^[4]. So are the Technical Deep Dive presentations that summarize or record those interviews, and any document that refers to Apple technology or parts ^[4]. That tracks Apple's allegations. Apple says the defendants improperly obtained information from Apple employees during recruitment interviews ^[2], and that former Apple employees at OpenAI coached others on what to bring to their own interviews ^[14].

OpenAI had argued that Apple's demands were overly broad and that expedited discovery was unnecessary because the regular process was about to begin ^[18]. On the interview materials, the court agreed with Apple that they should be expedited, TechCrunch reported ^[10].

The two reports size Apple's win differently. 9to5mac said Davila granted most of Apple's requests and rejected or postponed the rest ^[15]. TechCrunch said he did not greenlight all of them ^[16]. "Most" is 9to5mac's characterization.

TechCrunch reported that the denials went past the product-specific R&D files. The judge also turned down broader requests, including access to OpenAI's hardware research and to information about what former employees created while working there ^[12]. He left Apple room to narrow those requests and try again ^[13]. On the postponed set, Davila found Apple's definition of "Apple Originated Information" "amorphous as currently defined" ^[8].

In our view the order sorts evidence by conduct. What recruiters did and said comes early; what the product is made of waits ^[4][7]. That fits Apple's stated purpose. It wants early discovery to gauge the extent of the alleged misappropriation and to support a preliminary injunction against further embedding of alleged trade secrets in OpenAI's hardware work ^[17]. Neither report describes a finding on whether any trade secret was taken.

For a team that hires from a rival, the order suggests a two-axis sort of every interview artifact. One axis is whether the document steers an interview, like a script, or records one, like a debrief deck. The other is whether it names the other company's technology or parts. The order reached documents of both kinds and called out any that refer to Apple technology or parts ^[4]. We'd expect a rival's lawyers to ask first for the document that does both: records an interview and names parts.

Our recommendation is to keep scripts generic and keep parts-level detail out of debriefs. The tradeoff is real. Interviewers lose a shortcut for probing depth, and the hiring manager who has to defend a hire on Friday gets a thinner record to point to.