Apple sues OpenAI; SK Hynix lands a record $26.5 billion US IPO

Apple filed a federal lawsuit accusing OpenAI and two former Apple employees of stealing confidential product designs, manufacturing processes, and supply-chain strategies to jump-start OpenAI's own consumer devices. The complaint says one ex-engineer used an authentication bug to pull dozens of internal hardware files, and that OpenAI's hardware chief emailed himself Apple supplier details before leaving. It is a striking rupture for two companies that partnered in 2024 to put ChatGPT inside the iPhone.

The South Korean chipmaker priced its Nasdaq debut at $149 a share, raising about $26.5 billion and topping Alibaba's 2014 record for a foreign listing. SK Hynix is the leader in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) — the specialized chips that feed data to the processors training and running AI models — and controlled roughly 58 percent of that market early this year. The seven-times-oversubscribed offering is a direct bet that AI demand has broken the memory industry's old boom-and-bust cycle.

Fidji Simo, who joined OpenAI in 2025 as CEO of Applications and ran its product and business operations, said she is leaving her full-time post after a severe flare of a chronic illness that had kept her on medical leave since April. She will stay on as a part-time advisor. Her exit removes the executive Sam Altman had installed to consolidate OpenAI's sprawling consumer and enterprise operations, leaving a gap at the top just as the company ships GPT-5.6 and pushes into agentic products.

OpenAI published a machine-generated proof of the Cycle Double Cover Conjecture, a graph-theory problem open since the 1970s, which it says GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra produced in under an hour by running 64 subagents that pursued competing approaches and audited each other. The claim is not settled: the conjecture has drawn several previous "proofs" that later collapsed, and graph theorists are only now stress-testing the argument. Still, it is a notable data point for AI as a research collaborator rather than just a chatbot.

Lyzr, a three-year-old maker of enterprise AI agents, raised a $100 million Series B at roughly a $500 million valuation — and says an agent it built, nicknamed SivaClaw, ran much of the process itself. The agent fielded questions from more than 130 investors, drafted memos, and tracked which pitch-deck slides backers lingered on, pulling in $400 million of interest without the founders working the usual Silicon Valley coffee circuit. It is an unusually literal proof that the product works.

Amazon and University of Michigan researchers unveiled HydroShear, a physics-based simulator that teaches robotic hands to use touch for delicate manipulation and — crucially — transfers those skills from simulation to real hardware without retraining. Tactile feedback is one of the hardest gaps between lab demos and reliable real-world robots, so a simulation that closes the sim-to-real divide matters for warehouses and factories first. The work was accepted to the Robotics: Science and Systems conference.