The Signal · Column 083

Your interview notes just became legal documents

Andrei van Noordt · 14 October 2026 · 1 min read

A federal judge has ruled that Apple can see how OpenAI interviews Apple's people. The order gives Apple access to OpenAI's interview materials involving former Apple employees, along with private messages and testimony from central figures in the case. Whatever the court eventually decides about trade secrets, something has already shifted. A hiring process that everyone in the room assumed was private is now a set of documents with an audience.

Most of the reaction I have seen treats this as two large companies fighting, which is the least interesting part. The reading people miss is that the interview itself has become the evidence. Not the offer letter, not the first ninety days, the conversation. When a candidate walks in carrying deep knowledge of a competitor's roadmap, every question you ask near that knowledge can later be read aloud by someone whose job is to make it sound like theft.

Your interview notes are no longer a hiring artifact. They are a legal one.

This reprices two things at once. The first is obvious: the senior hire from a direct rival was already expensive, and now arrives with a discovery risk attached to whatever your interviewers wrote down. The second is quieter and matters more. It reprices the people who run your hiring. An interviewer who can probe someone's judgment to the bone without ever fishing for proprietary detail is doing genuinely skilled work, and almost nobody has been trained to do it. Most hiring managers in this market were taught to dig for specifics, because specifics are how you tell real experience from a polished story.

For hiring leaders, the practical read is simple. Write your interview questions as though a hostile lawyer will read them, because one eventually might, and brief every interviewer in writing on the line between assessing how someone thinks and harvesting what they know. Do it before your next competitor hire, not after the subpoena, because the version you write under pressure is the one that gets quoted.