By MATT O’BRIEN

A secretive competition to pioneer a new way of communicating with artificial intelligence chatbots is getting a messy public airing as OpenAI fights a trademark dispute over its stealth hardware collaboration with legendary iPhone designer Jony Ive.

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In the latest twist, tech startup iyO Inc., which already sued Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for trademark infringement, is now suing one of its own former employees for allegedly leaking a confidential drawing of iyO’s unreleased product.

At the heart of this bitter legal wrangling is a big idea: we shouldn’t need to stare at computer or phone screens or talk to a box like Amazon’s Alexa to interact with our future AI assistants in a natural way. And whoever comes up with this new AI interface could profit immensely from it.

OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, started to outline its own vision in May by buying io Products, a product and engineering company co-founded by Ive, in a deal valued at nearly $6.5 billion. Soon after, iyO sued for trademark infringement for the similar sounding name and because of the firms’ past interactions.

U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson ruled last month that iyO has a strong enough case to proceed to a hearing this fall. Until then, she ordered Altman, Ive and OpenAI to refrain from using the io brand, leading them to take down the web page and all mentions of the venture.

A second lawsuit from iyO filed this week in San Francisco Superior Court accuses a former iyO executive, Dan Sargent, of breach of contract and misappropriation of trade secrets over his meetings with another io co-founder, Tang Yew Tan, a close Ive ally who led design of the Apple Watch.

Sargent left iyO in December and now works for Apple. He and Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

“This is not an action we take lightly,” said iyO CEO Jason Rugolo in a statement Thursday. “Our primary goal here is not to target a former employee, whom we considered a friend, but to hold accountable those whom we believe preyed on him from a position of power.”

Rugolo told The Associated Press last month that he thought he was on the right path in 2022 when he pitched his ideas and showed off his prototypes to firms tied to Altman and Ive. Rugolo later publicly expanded on his earbud-like “audio computer” product in a TED Talk last year.

What he didn’t know was that, by 2023, Ive and Altman had begun quietly collaborating on their own AI hardware initiative.

“I’m happy to compete on product, but calling it the same name, that part is just amazing to me. And it was shocking,” Rugolo said in an interview.

The new venture was revealed publicly in a May video announcement, and to Rugolo about two months earlier after he had emailed Altman with an investment pitch.

“thanks but im working on something competitive so will (respectfully) pass!” Altman wrote to Rugolo in March, adding in parentheses that it was called io.

Altman has dismissed iyO’s lawsuit on social media as a “silly, disappointing and wrong” move from a “quite persistent” Rugolo. Other executives in court documents characterized the product Rugolo was pitching as a failed one that didn’t work properly in a demo.

Altman said in a written declaration that he and Ive chose the name two years ago in reference to the concept of “input/output” that describes how a computer receives and transmits information. Neither io nor iyO was first to play with the phrasing — Google’s flagship annual technology showcase is called I/O — but Altman said he and Ive acquired the io.com domain name in August 2023.

The idea was “to create products that go beyond traditional products and interfaces,” Altman said. “We want to create new ways for people to input their requests and new ways for them to receive helpful outputs, powered by AI.”

A number of startups have already tried, and mostly failed, to build gadgetry for AI interactions. The startup Humane developed a wearable pin that you could talk to, but the product was poorly reviewed and the startup discontinued sales after HP acquired its assets earlier this year.

Altman has suggested that io’s version could be different. He said in a now-removed video that he’s already trying a prototype at home that Ive gave him, calling it “the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.”

Altman and Ive still haven’t said is what exactly it is. The court case, however, has forced their team to disclose what it’s not.

“Its design is not yet finalized, but it is not an in-ear device, nor a wearable device,” said Tan in a court declaration that sought to distance the venture from iyO’s product.

It was that same declaration that led iyO to sue Sargent this week. Tan revealed in the filing that he had talked to a “now former” iyO engineer who was looking for a job because of his frustration with “iyO’s slow pace, unscalable product plans, and continued acceptance of preorders without a sellable product.”

Those conversations with the unnamed employee led Tan to conclude “that iyO was basically offering ‘vaporware’ — advertising for a product that does not actually exist or function as advertised, and my instinct was to avoid meeting with iyO myself and to discourage others from doing so.”

IyO said its investigators recently reached out to Sargent and confirmed he was the one who met with Tan.

FILE – Jason Rugolo, founder and CEO of iyO, wears the iyO One audio computer in his ears while being interviewed at the company’s office in Redwood City, Calif., Tuesday, June 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)

Rugolo told the AP he feels duped after he first pitched his idea to Altman in 2022 through the Apollo Projects, a venture capital firm started by Altman and his brothers. Rugolo said he demonstrated his products and the firm politely declined, with the explanation that they don’t do consumer hardware investments.

That same year, Rugolo also pitched the same idea to Ive through LoveFrom, the San Francisco design firm started by Ive after his 27-year career at Apple. Ive’s firm also declined.

“I feel kind of stupid now,” Rugolo added. “Because we talked for so long. I met with them so many times and demo’d all their people — at least seven people there. Met with them in person a bunch of times, talking about all our ideas.”

The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of AP’s text archives.

By KELVIN CHAN

LONDON (AP) — TikTok is facing a fresh European Union privacy investigation into user data sent to China, regulators said Thursday.

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The Data Protection Commission opened the inquiry as a follow up to a previous investigation that ended earlier this year with a 530 million euro ($620 million) fine after it found the video sharing app put users at risk of spying by allowing remote access their data from China.

The Irish national watchdog serves as TikTok’s lead data privacy regulator in the 27-nation EU because the company’s European headquarters is based in Dublin.

During an earlier investigation, TikTok initially told the regulator it didn’t store European user data in China, and that data was only accessed remotely by staff in China. However, it later backtracked and said that some data had in fact been stored on Chinese servers. The watchdog responded at the time by saying it would consider further regulatory action.

“As a result of that consideration, the DPC has now decided to open this new inquiry into TikTok,” the watchdog said.

“The purpose of the inquiry is to determine whether TikTok has complied with its relevant obligations under the GDPR in the context of the transfers now at issue, including the lawfulness of the transfers,” the regulator said, referring to the European Union’s strict privacy rules, known as the General Data Protection Regulation.

TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, has been under scrutiny in Europe over how it handles personal user information amid concerns from Western officials that it poses a security risk.

TikTok noted that it was one that notified the Data Protection Commission, after it embarked on a data localization project called Project Clover that involved building three data centers in Europe to ease security concerns.

“Our teams proactively discovered this issue through the comprehensive monitoring TikTok implemented under Project Clover,” the company said in a statement. “We promptly deleted this minimal amount of data from the servers and informed the DPC. Our proactive report to the DPC underscores our commitment to transparency and data security.”

Under GDPR, European user data can only be transferred outside of the bloc if there are safeguards in place to ensure the same level of protection. Only 15 countries or territories are deemed to have the same data privacy standard as the EU, but China is not one of them.

By CLAUDIA LAUER

As the Guadalupe River swelled from a wall of water heading downstream, sirens blared over the tiny river community of Comfort — a last-ditch warning to get out for those who had missed cellphone alerts and firefighters going street-to-street telling people to get out.

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Daniel Morales, assistant chief of the Comfort Volunteer Fire Department, believes that long, flat tone the morning of July Fourth saved lives.

The sirens are a testament to the determination of a community that has experienced deadly floods in the past, warning residents of devastating floodwaters that hours earlier had killed at least 118 people in communities along the same river, including 27 campers and counselors in neighboring Kerr County. That county did not have a warning system like the one in Comfort.

Everyone in Comfort, a more than 2,200-person unincorporated community in Kendall County, survived the flooding with many people along the river evacuating in time, Morales said.

Comfort residents were driven by history

Morales has been with the department for decades. He was there when flooding in 1978 killed 33 people, 15 of them in Comfort, including his grandfather. So when an opportunity arose last year to expand the community’s emergency warning system, he and other residents buckled down to find the funding.

The fire department’s siren needed an upgrade. While the firehouse got a new siren, Morales found a Missouri company that was willing to refurbish the old one at a low cost so it could be moved to a central location in Comfort Park where it was connected to a U.S. Geological Survey sensor at Cypress Creek. When the water level reaches a certain point, the sensor triggers the siren, but it can also be sounded manually.

“We do for ourselves and for the community,” Morales said. “If we hadn’t had a drought the past months and the (Cypress) Creek hadn’t been down, we could have had another (19)78. The past few days, I’ll tell you, it brings back a lot.”

Overcoming the cost hurdle for sirens

Morales said they cobbled together money from a grant, from the county commission, the department’s own budget and from the local electric utility, which also donated a siren pole. They also got help installing the flood sensor gauge in the creek.

The price tag with all the donated materials and the costs the department fronted was somewhere around $50,000 to $60,000 or “maybe a little more,” Morales said.

In Kerr County, the price tag for a proposed flood warning system for a larger swath of the Guadalupe River was close to $1 million, which caused several county and city officials to balk when attempts at grants and other funding opportunities fell through. They ultimately didn’t install the warning systems near the camps where dozens of young campers died in the recent flooding.

In Comal County, Texas, about 90 miles east of Kerr County, the Guadalupe River meanders into Canyon Lake before picking back up on its journey to empty into the San Antonio Bay on the Gulf Coast. The county along with Guadalupe County, New Braunfels city government and the Water-Oriented Recreation District- a state-created entity- agreed to fund expanded flood sirens along the Guadalupe River. The project was completed in 2015 and Comal County now manages the system including the information from the river gauges and notifications about the river height. A message left for Comal County officials seeking details about the cost of the system was not returned Thursday.

Training residents was key to success

After the updated Comfort sirens were installed, the volunteer fire department spent months getting the community used to the siren tests that sound daily at noon, putting out messaging that if they hear a siren any other time of day, they should check local TV stations, the department’s Facebook page and elsewhere for emergency notifications.

The sirens make a specific sound for tornadoes and a long, flat tone for floods.

So on July Fourth, if people in Comfort hadn’t seen the weather alerts sent to phones or announced on radios, if they hadn’t heard shouting firefighters going from street to street to evacuate, they heard the long tone and knew they had to leave their homes. A Facebook post on the department’s page noted a mandatory evacuation of all residents along the Guadalupe River.

But Comfort was also miles away from the flash flooding that overtook the camps and didn’t experience the cresting of the river flooding until after the terrifying rush of water in the pitch black early morning hours hit cabins. Many Comfort residents were already awake and aware of the rising water by the time the sirens sounded. The Guadalupe’s crest was among the highest ever recorded at Comfort, rising from hip-height to three stories tall in over just two hours.

Morales doesn’t know if sirens would have changed things in Kerr County. But he knows they gave Comfort residents an extra level of warning. In recent days, Morales said he has been contacted by some of the funders to talk about adding a third siren in town.

“Anything we can do to add to the safety, we’re going to sit down and try to make it work,” he said. “The way things are happening, it might be time to enhance the system even further.”

This story has been updated to correct the name of a county to Kerr County, instead of Kerry County, in the 10th paragraph.

Lauer reported from Philadelphia.

By MICHAEL PHILLIS

Over just two hours, the Guadalupe River at Comfort, Texas, rose from hip-height to three stories tall, sending water weighing as much as the Empire State building downstream roughly every minute it remained at its crest.

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The force of floodwater is often more powerful and surprising than people imagine.

Comfort offers a good lens to consider the terrible force of a flash flood’s wall of water because it’s downstream of where the river’s rain-engorged branches met. The crest was among the highest ever recorded at the spot — flash flooding that appears so fast it can “warp our brains,” said James Doss-Gollin, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University.

The Texas flood smashed through buildings, carried away cars and ripped sturdy trees out by the roots, dropping the debris in twisted piles when the water finally ebbed. It killed more than 100 people, prompted scores of rescues and left dozens of others missing. The deaths were concentrated upriver in Kerr County, an area that includes Camp Mystic, the devastated girls’ camp, where the water hit early and with little notice.

A helicopter flies over the Guadalupe River after a flash flood swept through the area, Friday, July 4, 2025, in Kerrville, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Water is capable of such destruction because it is heavy and can move fast. Just one cubic foot of water — imagine a box a bit larger than the size of a basketball — weighs about 62 pounds. When the river rose to its peak at Comfort, 177,000 cubic feet — or 11 million pounds of water — flowed by every second.

“When you have that little lead time … that means you can’t wait until the water level starts to rise,” Doss-Gollin said. “You need to take proactive measures to get people to safety.”

Water as heavy as a jumbo jet

A small amount of water — less than many might think — can sweep away people, cars and homes. Six inches is enough to knock people off their feet. A couple of feet of fast-moving water can take away an SUV or truck, and even less can move cars.

“Suppose you are in a normal car, a normal sedan, and a semitrailer comes and pushes you at the back of the car. That’s the kind of force you’re talking about,” said Venkataraman Lakshmi, a University of Virginia professor and president of the hydrology section of the American Geophysical Union.

This aerial photo shows damage from flash floods along the Guadalupe River in Ingram, Texas, Thursday, July 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

And at Comfort, it took just over 15 minutes for so much water to arrive that not only could it float away a large pickup truck, but structures were in danger — water as heavy as a jumbo jet moved by every second.

At that point, “We are past vehicles, homes and things can start being affected,” said Daniel Henz, flood warning program manager at the flood control district of Maricopa County, Arizona, an area that gets dangerous scary flash floods.

The water not only pushes objects but floats them, and that can actually be scarier. The feeling of being pushed is felt immediately, letting a person know they are in danger. Upward force may not be felt until it is overwhelming, according to Upmanu Lall, a water expert at Arizona State University and Columbia University.

“The buoyancy happens — it’s like a yes, no situation. If the water reaches a certain depth and it has some velocity, you’re going to get knocked off (your feet) and floating simultaneously,” he said.

The mechanics of a flash flood

The landscape created the conditions for what some witnesses described as a fast-moving wall of water.

Lots of limestone covered by a thin layer of soil in hilly country meant that when rain fell, it ran quickly downhill with little of it absorbed by the ground, according to S. Jeffress Williams, senior scientist emeritus with the U.S. Geological Survey.

A flood gauge marks the height of water flowing over a farm-to-market road near Kerrville, Texas, on Friday, July 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

A flash flood generally starts with an initial lead wave and then builds as rain rushes over the landscape and into the river basin. It may rise quickly, but the water still takes some time to converge.

The water crumpled cars into piles, twisted steel and knocked trees down as if they were strands of grass. Images captured the chaos and randomness of the water’s violence.

And then, not as fast as it rose, but still quickly, the river receded.

Five hours after its crest at Comfort, it had already dropped 10 feet, revealing its damage in retreat. A couple of days after it started to rise, a person could stand with their head above the river again.

“Everything just can happen, very, very quickly,” Henz said.

Associated Press writer Seth Borenstein in Washington contributed.

The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment