Tech Brew Ride Home - OpenAI Has Receipts

Episode Date: August 4, 2026

OpenAI took Apple's trade-secrets lawsuit to the court of public opinion, receipts and all. Bending Spoons bought Airtable, Anthropic inked a $10B Norway compute deal, the US eyed polysilicon tariffs, and Microsoft told engineers tokenmaxxing was over. Links OpenAI drags Apple's lawsuit into the court of public opinion (The Verge) Bending Spoons agrees to acquire Airtable in an all-cash deal valuing the US software company at $1.285B, set to close by 2026's end, its first post-IPO deal (Reuters) Bending Spoons buys Airtable at an implied equity value of ~$2.25B, five years after a $735M round valued the no-code company at $11.7B; Airtable's ARR is now ~$480M (Silicon Republic) Sources: Anthropic agreed to a $10B deal for computing capacity in Norway from Nvidia-backed AI cloud startup Volta Infra, which says the deal is for six years (Bloomberg) Sources: the US is preparing to set a price floor and impose tariffs on polysilicon, a material critical to chips, later this month, in a bid to counter China (Reuters) Sources: Beijing is growing concerned about the cyber capabilities of Mythos and other US-developed frontier AI models and their potential as offensive weapons (Bloomberg) White House to host AI companies Tuesday to review new model-testing framework (CNBC) Internal email: Microsoft introduces token budget limits for employees' AI use, saying "tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for" (404 Media) Subscribe to the ad-free feed.

Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride Home Podcast for Tuesday, August 4th, 2026. My father is Brian McCullough, and today OpenAI took Apple's trade secrets lawsuit to the Court of Public Opinion, receipts and all. Bendine Spoons bought Airtable, Anthropic Inc to a $10 billion Norway compute deal. The U.S. eyed polysilicon tariffs, and Microsoft told engineers token maxing was over. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Hey, remember that Apple suing Open AI thing? Well, opening I has come to the court of public opinion. Disputing claims that former staff members use confidential information and went so far as to share actual eye messages and emails. They brought receipts, as they say, quoting the verge. In a blog post published overnight titled Apple is getting this wrong, OpenAI said that Apple's lawsuit accusing it of stealing trade secrets is, quote, careless, aggressive, and oddly personal. sharing iMessage and email exchanges to challenge allegations central to the case. This isn't a legal response from Open AI, but it is an attempt to sway the court of public opinion

by poking contradictions into Apple's case using cherry-picked communications. The lawsuit filed by Apple last month primarily revolves around former Apple employees Chang Liu and Tang Tan, who have since joined Open AI. Liu was a former iPhone engineer who now works on OpenAI's technical team, and Tan was employed by Apple for 25 years, formerly overseeing the iPhone and Apple Watch design before taking on the role of OpenAI's chief hardware officer. Apple alleges they took, quote, secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes, and products with them to advance OpenAI's hardware. Reuters reports that Apple asked for a preliminary injunction on

Monday to prevent Liu, Tan, and Open AI from accessing, acquiring, using, or disclosing alleged confidential information while the lawsuit moves ahead. Quote, Apple's request for a preliminary injunction is both based on false information and completely unnecessary because we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets opening I said in its blog post. We're much more interested in building innovative products and technologies that push the frontier, end quote. Apple's lawsuit alleges that Liu failed to return a company-owned computer and used

in authentication vulnerability to access Apple's cloud-based. network storage weeks after he left the company. Liu is also accused of downloading confidential files from Apple's storage system and instructing another Apple colleague on how to do so and, quote, avoid trouble, end quote, with the company's security team ahead of her joining OpenAI. Open AI's clapback paints this in a different light. Apple accuses Chang Liu of accessing Apple confidential information after leaving the company, but only now admits that Apple employees reached out to him and asked for his

help to locate this information. Apple now tries to ship the blame to residual access, but they also don't disclose that this is a common issue with Apple, which is caused by them failing to properly manage system access when people leave. What that means in practice is that former employees who are trying to do the right thing when they leave still have access to Apple files, despite not wanting them or even being aware of them, end quote. In its lawsuit, Apple also alleges that Tan asked for confidential Apple information when interviewing Apple employees for OpenAI jobs and instructed interviewees to showcase some of the Apple components they worked on. In response, OpenAI says that Tan, quote, has always been clear with the team that we do not

want and must not use any confidential information from other companies. In its blog post, OpenAI also refuted allegations that it didn't respond to Apple's initial inquiries saying that Apple now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person, person after confusing two Asian last names and has conceded that it didn't have a discussion with OpenAIs General Counsel. The chat GPT maker published emails of interactions between the two company's legal counsel alongside IMessages, Liu exchanged with an Apple employee. You can read them in full on OpenAI's blog post, end quote. I feel like I need a good long read on bending spoons because they've been doing a lot of stuff, a lot lately,

including acquiring Airtable and an all-cash deal valuing the U.S. software company at $1.28 billion, which is set to close by the end of the year. This would be Benning Spoon's first post-IPO deal. Did I mention Bending Spoon went public? They did recently, quoting Silicon Republic. Italy's Bending Spoons has agreed to buy U.S. Automation Company Airtable in an implied equity value of a RAPL.

down $2.25 billion in its first acquisition deal since going public last month. The all-cash deal is for an enterprise value of only $1.28 billion. F. FYI, that means that it's mostly the cash on their balance sheet, quoting again. Founded in 2013, well before the explosive popularity of Generative AI, Airtable enables teams to build custom applications without code or engineering. The company said its platform is used by more than 500,000 organizations, including 80% of the Fortune 100. The software startup was valued at $11.7 billion following a $735 million funding run in 2021, which brought the business up to profitability for the first time. Company's CEO, Howie Liu, said at the time that Airtable intended to go public in a few years.

However, the advent of tools such as ChatGBT and Claude have Claude back, Airtable's market share, by providing similar and more advanced capabilities. Still, Airtable has managed an annual recurring revenue growth of more than 20% year over year to approximately $480 million as of June this year, the company said. Partnering with Bending Spoons gives us the resources and the long-term commitment airtable needs to pursue our vision even more boldly as we build the AI-Native platform of the future, said Liu, in a joint statement with Bending Spoons announcing the acquisition. Bending Spoons led by Matteo Danieli, Luca Ferrari, Francesco Petronello, and Luca Querella acquires and revamps struggling digital businesses. Its portfolio of more than 50 companies

includes Evernote, We Transfer, Eventbrite, and AOL. The company's recent public listing raised around $1.68 billion at a roughly $18.4 billion valuation at a time when investor attention is largely turned to AI. In a recent government filing, Benning Spoon said that it had identified more than 1,000 businesses as potential acquisition targets for the future. We're committed to investing in Airtable for the long run and doubling down on its core strength, bringing teams and workflows together in one flexible workspace, said Ferrari, we plan to expand what can be done across the full spectrum of work and make Airtable even more valuable to customers at every scale, end quote. I'm not doing this one because it's especially newsworthy, but what is newsworthy is kind of how

this goes. Remember circular financing. So go with me on this. Follow along. And throw up. has agreed to a $10 billion deal for computing capacity in Norway from an NVIDIA-backed AI cloud startup called Volta Infra. Vulta Infra announced today it raised $300 million, led by A16Z and Altimeter at a $2.4 billion valuation and said, oh, it's because we landed a $10 billion contract with an unnamed leading AI developer. Quoting Bloomberg. The Data Center site in Norway offers 133 megawatts of capacity and will be stocked with Nvidia's newest Vera Rubin chips, Volta said. Founded in January by former executives from Brookfield Asset Management, Volta leases AI capacity and helps clients finance deals for costly chips. The startup announced

Tuesday that it raised nearly $300 million in venture funding, valuing it at $2.4 billion. Volta's partner BitDeer is among a growing number of Bitcoin mining companies that are converting some of their data centers from minting the cryptocurrency to supporting AI applications as Bitcoin prices slump. BitDeer plans to convert some of its crypto sites in Texas, Tennessee, and Washington State, according to a monthly operational update by the company on July 21st. Anthropic and rival OpenAI have relied on a mix of large tech firms and newer cloud computing startups to help build out the data center capacity they see as necessary for developing better AI. systems and supporting wider adoption.

Open AI Sam Aldman has previously said he expects the company to spend trillions on physical infrastructure for AI. The startup is currently planning a new data center in Georgia that may cost more than $30 billion. Nvidia is also in discussions to help Open AI lease a $500 billion 10 gigawatt hub. That soft bank group is overseeing an Ohio. Bloomberg news has reported over the past year, a number of financing arrangements involving Open AI Anthropic have been. criticized for being circular in nature. These deals create an increasingly interconnected web

of dependencies between technology suppliers and AI developers that risks magnifying losses if AI demand fails to live up to the lofty expectations, end quote. This is a new tit for tat that I was currently unaware of. Sources say the U.S. is preparing to set a price floor and impose tariffs on polysilicon, a material critical to chips, later this month, and a bid to counter China. What if we have rare ingredients to China? Quoting Reuters. President Donald Trump's year-long national security investigation into polysilicon by the Commerce Department also has major implications for the growing domestic solar manufacturing industry at a time when the U.S. leader has rolled back federal support for renewable energy.

Polysilicon, an ultra-pure form of silicon sits at the start of the semiconductor and solar manufacturing supply chains. Manufacturers turn silicon wafers into solar cells and then assemble those into panels used in solar projects. Domestic semiconductor manufacturing, a Trump priority, depends on solar because the solar industry's larger demand for polysilicon helps support production of the material required for chips. The chip industry accounts for 2.4% of global polysilicon demand, the semiconductor industry association said. They're finding that they do actually need solar set run rec, chief strategy officer at Japan's Toyo, which operates a solar panel facility near Houston, and plans to invest $357 million in a nearby solar cell facility. The administration

is expected to pursue a hybrid system combining a minimum import price with tariffs on polysilicon and derivative products, according to the sources familiar with the deliberations who spoke on condition of anonymity, end quote. More tit for tat. Sources say Beijing is growing concerned about the cyber capabilities of Mythos and other U.S. developed frontier AI models and their potential as offensive weapons, quoting Bloomberg. They see the potential for models like mythos to be used as an offensive weapon and question why Anthropic is denying China access to the systems for normal purposes, the people said. China wants to preserve a relatively warm atmosphere before Xi Jinping's

planned September 24th visit to the U.S. and is seeking a win-win approach at AI talks expected before the leaders meet. The people said, even so, suspicion remains high between the governments with the U.S. expressing concern that Chinese companies are using American frontier models to train their own versions. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent last month floated unspecified sanctions if model developers are found to have stolen an intellectual property after Beijing-based moonshot AI released a system said to rival some of the best American model. models, China's Commerce Ministry, which oversees expert controls, warned last week that would take all necessary measures in response to the U.S. threats.

The people familiar with the matter said, Beijing isn't preparing any immediate action against Anthropic or other U.S. AI developers, but officials are drawing up potential responses should the U.S. take measures against Chinese companies in the sector. China's options could include imposing sanctions or adding American AI companies to one of the nation's restricted entity lists, the people said. The tensions illustrate how AI is becoming an increasingly unpredictable front in the U.S.-China relationship. The two countries remain strategic rivals despite reaching a 12-month truce last October over tariffs and supplies of rare earth minerals. While that deal is widely expected to be extended, both sides continue to pursue

self-sufficiency in key industries and maintain broad restrictions on cutting-edge technology, end quote. Finally today, the end to token maxing has been here for a while now, but it's here now everywhere, quoting 404 Media. Microsoft has introduced new limits on how much its engineers can spend on AI tools at work and told employees that maximizing AI use internally is not the company's goal. This makes Microsoft one of the last major companies to rein in its employees' expensive AI use, scaling back maximalist AI use or what some companies have called token maxing is a trend we've

covered in recent months as the price for using AI has increased while not always delivering commensurate productivity gains. As we accelerate our use of GitHub co-pilot to deliver on our goals, we all need to be aware of how we consume tokens. Jay Park, an executive vice president at Microsoft said in an email to Microsoft employees, GitHub is owned by Microsoft and GitHub co-pilot is an AI coding tool. Token maxing is not what we are optimizing for. I want all of us focused on maximizing outcomes that move the needle for our customers and our business. Parik said, end quote. As you can hear, my studio is not set back up yet. Hopefully it will be tomorrow. And also, I had somebody looking over my shoulder as I produced the show today all day long.

I wanted to add so much excessive commentary, but he wouldn't let me. Talk to tomorrow.