Hard Fork · Friday, July 17, 2026
The conversation touched upon the fluidity of talent between AI companies, noting that in California, non-compete agreements are difficult to enforce. This leads to employees frequently moving between companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, potentially taking knowledge and trade secrets with them.
“I think it's a bigger conversation that we don't have time for today, but I'm always just fascinated by how leaky and sort of porous the boundaries between these AI companies are.”
“I think in California, you can't really enforce a non-compete. So people are always moving jobs from OpenAI to Anthropic, from Google DeepMind to OpenAI, like people are just bouncing around all of the time and they're taking their secrets with them, right?”
“Like, you can't take the intellectual property, you can't like literally take the code for your model. But just knowing how to build something is not a protected IP.”