Sam Altman and Jony Ive formed a dream team to reinvent hardware. Now it’s at the center of a battle for OpenAI’s future

First publishedJul 22, 07:01 UTC

Last updatedJul 28, 19:18 UTC · 7m ago

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Fortune6Sam Altman and Jony Ive formed a dream team to reinvent hardware. Now it’s at the center of a battle for OpenAI’s futureJul 22, 07:01 UTCOpen ↗

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As Jony Ive and Sam Altman hugged and sipped espressos at a picturesque North Beach cafe in San Francisco in May 2025, a new war was brewing. The coffee date was featured in a viral video to announce that Altman’s OpenAI was acquiring io Products, a small hardware startup founded by Ive, the legendary designer of the Apple iPhone and perhaps the world’s most famous tech product designer. Their alliance signaled a brazen ambition to build the next great consumer product—this time for the AI age, and a bet that OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, could unseat the likes of Apple using the iPhone maker’s former design star. Now, before any products have even been released, a scorched-earth lawsuit from Apple that accuses OpenAI of trade secret theft has thrown those plans into chaos, raising the stakes for the AI startup—and Ive—to deliver a flawless, high-profile hit device.

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  Sam Altman and Jony Ive formed a dream team to reinvent hardware. Now it’s at the center of a battle for OpenAI’s future

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