A US jury has ordered Apple to pay more than $5.7 billion to San Diego-based Taction after finding that technology used in Apple’s iPhone and Apple Watch devices infringed two of Taction’s patents.

The verdict, delivered Friday, is the largest patent infringement award against Apple to date, according to the company, and is likely to trigger a lengthy appeals process. Apple said it plans to challenge the decision, arguing that its technology is fundamentally different from Taction’s patented system.

The case centers on Apple’s Taptic Engine, the technology responsible for the tapping and vibration sensations users experience when interacting with devices including iPhones and Apple Watches.

The jury found that the Taptic Engine infringed two patents owned by Taction, a San Diego company that develops haptic technology for products including headphones and gaming headsets.

Apple rejected the finding.

“Apple’s Taptic Engine is fundamentally different from Taction’s technology, which Taction’s own testing of Apple’s products confirmed during trial,” Apple said in a statement.

“Apple does not use Taction’s technology, and we will appeal,” the company added.

Taction’s attorney, Lance Yang, said the company was satisfied with the verdict.

“We’re happy the jury found for Taction and vindicated its patent rights,” Yang said.

The case dates back to 2021, when Taction sued Apple alleging that the company’s devices incorporated technology covered by its patents. Apple denied the allegations and said that the patents were invalid.

The litigation has already passed through several stages of the US court system. A federal judge in San Diego ruled in 2023 that Apple had not infringed Taction’s patents. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit revived the case last year, allowing the dispute to proceed to trial.

Friday’s verdict now puts the case on a potentially lengthy path through the appeals process.

Why The Verdict Matters

The size of the award makes the case significant beyond the immediate dispute over haptic technology.

A $5.7 billion judgment would represent a substantial financial exposure for Apple if it ultimately survives appeal. The company, however, has enormous cash generation and financial resources, meaning the immediate question for investors is likely to be whether the verdict can withstand further judicial review rather than whether Apple can afford the payment.

Haptic feedback is an integral part of the user experience on smartphones and wearable devices. Apple’s Taptic Engine allows physical sensations to accompany actions such as pressing buttons, receiving notifications, and interacting with software features. The technology has therefore become embedded in the company’s hardware and software ecosystem.

Taction’s lawsuit seeks to establish that elements of that technology fall within the scope of its patents.

Apple’s response points to the central issue that is likely to remain important on appeal: whether the company’s Taptic Engine actually falls within the technical claims protected by Taction’s patents.

Apple’s position is that its system is fundamentally different and that Taction’s own testing supported that distinction. Taction, by contrast, argued that Apple’s implementation infringed its patent rights.

The appellate history makes the dispute more consequential. The fact that the Federal Circuit previously revived the case after the district court ruled for Apple means the legal battle has already survived one major challenge.

The latest verdict does not necessarily mean Taction will ultimately collect the full $5.7 billion. Apple has said it will appeal, and the amount of a final judgment can potentially change through subsequent court proceedings.

However, the jury’s finding represents a major validation of Taction’s claims after years of litigation. The company develops haptic technology for headphones and gaming headsets, and a successful outcome could strengthen the commercial significance of its intellectual property.

For Apple, the dispute adds another intellectual-property challenge involving technology embedded across a large installed base of devices. The company has repeatedly faced patent disputes over components and technologies used throughout its hardware ecosystem, making the potential financial consequences of such cases dependent heavily on whether courts ultimately uphold infringement findings and damages.

The next stage will therefore shift from the jury’s factual determination toward Apple’s legal challenge, with the Federal Circuit expected to play a central role if the company follows through on its appeal.

Circle Internet Group said Friday that Chief Financial Officer Jeremy Fox-Geen plans to step down after more than five years in the role, prompting the USDC issuer to begin a search for a successor as the company enters a new phase of expansion.

The New York-based stablecoin company said it is working with an executive search firm to identify its next finance chief. Fox-Geen, who joined Circle in May 2021, will remain CFO through the end of 2026 to support the transition, unless a successor is appointed earlier.

His departure comes after a period of rapid growth for Circle, which has moved from being a major player in the cryptocurrency industry to a publicly listed financial technology company with a stablecoin that has become one of the largest dollar-linked digital assets in circulation.

Fox-Geen played a central role in that transition, including overseeing the company’s financial operations during its $1.2 billion initial public offering last year.

“Jeremy has played a key role in building Circle into the company it is today. He brought strategic insight, financial leadership, and operating discipline through periods of both market turmoil and tremendous growth,” Circle Chief Executive Jeremy Allaire said.

Fox-Geen said he believed the timing was right for him to leave after reaching a number of milestones at the company.

“Having achieved many milestones, it is now the right time for me to step down and take a break before my next chapter,” he said.

The company did not provide details about the reasons for his departure beyond Fox-Geen’s statement.

Leadership Change Comes As Stablecoins Enter Mainstream Finance

Circle’s CFO transition comes at an important point for the stablecoin industry. Circle is the issuer of USDC, a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency whose market capitalization stands at about $75 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data. Stablecoins have increasingly become a bridge between traditional financial markets and the cryptocurrency ecosystem, with companies and financial institutions using them for payments, trading, and the movement of dollars across blockchain networks.

The expansion has also increased the financial and regulatory importance of Circle’s business.

The company has had to operate through major changes in the cryptocurrency market while building the infrastructure and financial controls required of a public company. The CFO therefore sits at the intersection of capital markets, financial reporting, regulatory requirements, and the economics of issuing a dollar-backed digital asset.

Fox-Geen’s decision to stay through the end of the year gives Circle time to conduct the search while maintaining continuity in its finance organization.

The timing also means investors will have an opportunity to assess whether the leadership transition changes Circle’s financial priorities as the company continues expanding USDC’s reach. A successor will inherit a business whose performance is closely tied to the scale of the stablecoin market, interest rates, and the amount of USDC circulating in the financial system.

Stablecoin issuers generally benefit from interest income generated on the reserves backing their tokens. That makes the financial leadership of Circle particularly relevant as monetary conditions change, because shifts in interest rates can affect the economics of holding those reserves. At the same time, greater adoption of USDC can increase the scale of the underlying reserve pool, creating an important link between stablecoin circulation and Circle’s financial performance.

Circle also announced a separate leadership change involving co-founder Sean Neville, who is stepping down from the company’s board of directors effective immediately for personal reasons.

The company described Neville’s departure as part of an orderly process of board refreshment in a regulatory filing.

Neville co-founded Circle and has remained an important figure in the company’s history as it expanded from a cryptocurrency startup into a larger financial technology business.

His departure from the board, together with Fox-Geen’s planned exit, represents a notable change in Circle’s senior leadership structure. The two moves are separate, however, and Circle did not indicate that they were connected.

For Circle, the immediate priority will be maintaining continuity while finding a CFO capable of managing a substantially larger and more complex financial operation than the one Fox-Geen joined in 2021. The company now has to balance the demands of a public-market investor base with the rapid evolution of stablecoins, increasing regulatory scrutiny and competition across digital-dollar infrastructure.

Fox-Geen’s decision to remain in the role through the end of 2026 gives Circle a lengthy transition period. The eventual appointment will nevertheless be closely watched because the CFO will inherit responsibility for the financial architecture of a company whose fortunes are increasingly tied to the broader adoption of digital dollars.

Joe Lonsdale, an investor in Anthropic and co-founder of technology company Palantir, has accused leading artificial intelligence companies of using warnings about existential AI risks to influence public policy, warning that poorly designed regulation could strengthen the market position of the very companies pushing for greater oversight.

Lonsdale, who also founded venture capital firm 8VC, made the comments Friday at the Reuters Momentum AI Austin event, where he challenged recent calls from some of the industry’s most prominent executives for a slowdown in the development of increasingly capable AI systems.

“I think that what OpenAI and Anthropic are pushing right now is very dangerous, and we don’t want an oligopoly that controls all of our policy here with the government,” Lonsdale said.

“Safety is a real thing, but fear and regulation — we’ve got to be really careful how we respond to those things.”

His argument goes to a growing fault line in the AI industry. The debate is no longer only about whether advanced models pose serious risks. It is also about who should decide how those risks are regulated, what standards companies must meet, and whether the rules could unintentionally favor the handful of companies with the money, computing infrastructure and technical resources to comply.

Lonsdale criticized what he described as efforts by people close to Anthropic and OpenAI to fund outside organizations advocating stronger AI regulation. In his view, such efforts could allow leading laboratories to help design a regulatory framework that smaller competitors would find harder to navigate, potentially reinforcing the incumbents’ position.

That concern has become more relevant as the technology industry’s safety debate has intensified.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk have all called this month for leading AI companies to slow the pace of development of their most advanced models. Their warnings have focused on the possibility that sophisticated AI systems could eventually operate beyond effective human oversight if safeguards fail to keep pace with capability gains.

Reuters reported that the safety debate has escalated sharply this month following concerns from researchers about AI systems evading safeguards, hacking computer systems and operating with levels of autonomy that developers have found difficult to monitor.

That backdrop complicates the argument that safety concerns are simply a lobbying strategy. There are documented incidents and internal concerns behind the industry’s warnings. At the same time, the companies making those warnings are also competing in an extremely valuable market and face commercial incentives that can make regulation economically consequential.

Anthropic, for example, has continued releasing increasingly capable models even as Amodei has called for a slowdown. The company launched Claude Opus 5.5 this week, saying it delivered performance comparable to its previous high-end model while reducing operating costs by 40%. The model also underwent external safety testing before release.

The development illustrates the industry’s central dilemma: companies can simultaneously believe that AI development presents serious risks and believe that they need to keep developing better systems to remain competitive.

Lonsdale himself stopped short of dismissing Anthropic’s work.

He praised Amodei and the company, in which he is a small investor, saying Anthropic had assembled exceptional talent and become a leader in AI.

“It’s very hard for anyone to second-guess the highest-performing company in the world over the last few years,” Lonsdale said. “I’m proud to be an investor in Anthropic.”

The debate is not simply dividing the AI industry into companies that care about safety and those that do not. The disagreement is about how safety should be achieved and who should bear the regulatory burden.

For smaller AI developers, expensive testing requirements, licensing systems, reporting obligations, or restrictions on model releases could raise barriers to entry. Larger laboratories may be better positioned to absorb those costs, potentially strengthening their competitive position.

For governments, however, leaving frontier AI companies to regulate themselves presents a different problem. The systems being developed by OpenAI, Anthropic and their competitors are becoming increasingly capable, while their potential impact extends beyond the companies’ own products.

A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 73% of Americans surveyed were concerned that AI companies were not doing enough to prevent potentially catastrophic consequences, while a majority favored federal involvement in setting AI safety standards.

The political pressure therefore extends beyond the industry’s own lobbying efforts.

AI Safety Debate Collides With US-China Competition

The regulatory argument is also unfolding against a geopolitical race between the United States and China.

Washington has increasingly treated AI leadership as a national-security and economic priority. At the same time, Chinese open-weight models have become more competitive with American systems, raising concerns in Washington that excessive restrictions on U.S. developers could slow domestic innovation while allowing Chinese competitors to gain ground.

Reuters reported earlier this month that the United States and China were preparing their first bilateral discussions focused specifically on AI safety, including possible cooperation on monitoring AI-directed cyberattacks and sharing information about emerging threats.

That competition gives another dimension to the debate over a slowdown.

If U.S. companies reduce the pace at which they develop frontier systems while Chinese developers continue advancing, American companies could lose technological ground. On the other hand, allowing sophisticated AI systems to proliferate without adequate safeguards could create security risks that are difficult to reverse.

The Trump administration has generally argued for a lighter regulatory approach. At a G20 technology meeting earlier this month, U.S. technology adviser Michael Kratsios urged countries to adopt the “Carolina Principles,” which call for reserving new AI regulation for novel circumstances rather than imposing broad new rules on the technology.

That position broadly aligns with the industry’s concern that regulation could constrain innovation, although it does not eliminate the question of how frontier systems should be tested or monitored.

The challenge now centers on the architecture of AI governance: whether safety should be handled primarily through voluntary commitments, government standards, independent testing, industry-led systems, or some combination of all four.

Lonsdale’s argument adds a market-structure concern to that discussion. If the companies developing the most advanced systems also have a major role in determining the standards they must satisfy, regulation could potentially become a competitive barrier as well as a safety mechanism.

Defense Technology and The Next Phase Of Autonomous Warfare

Lonsdale also discussed the rapidly expanding role of AI in defense, arguing that his portfolio companies are likely to deepen their relationships with Ukrainian defense-technology firms that have developed battlefield systems during Russia’s more than four-year war in Ukraine.

“We’re partnering very closely with them. A lot of our companies work with their companies,” Lonsdale said. “A lot of our companies are likely to buy some of the companies over there.”

Lonsdale has invested in defense technology companies including Anduril, placing his comments in the broader convergence of AI, drones and autonomous military systems.

He said autonomous weapons are likely to play an important role in warfare but argued that responsibility must remain with military leaders.

“There’s always a person responsible who is in charge of whatever system they studied, worked on and approved,” he said. “It’s very easy from the outside to judge these things when you’re not there in the fog of war.”

The question of human accountability has become consequential as militaries deploy systems capable of identifying targets, navigating environments and operating with progressively less direct human intervention.

The issue was highlighted by the U.S.-Iran conflict earlier this year after a strike on a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, killed more than 175 children and teachers, according to Iranian officials. Reuters reported that a preliminary U.S. military investigation found U.S. forces were likely responsible and pointed to outdated intelligence used in the targeting process.

The episode points to why the debate over autonomous weapons cannot be reduced to whether an algorithm technically makes the final decision. Accountability also extends to the people who design, authorize, deploy and supervise the systems and the information on which those systems operate.

Lonsdale’s remarks ultimately connect three intertwined areas of the technology industry: frontier AI, regulation and defense.

His warning about an AI oligopoly reflects a concern that deserves to be separated from the underlying question of AI safety. Advanced AI may present genuine risks that require external oversight, while regulation designed or influenced too heavily by incumbent companies could also affect competition.

Therefore, the challenge for policymakers goes beyond the debate about AI regulation. It is designing rules that can address demonstrated and emerging risks without allowing the companies with the greatest resources and market share to turn safety standards into barriers against competitors.

That tension is likely to escalate as AI systems move from generating information to controlling software, conducting cyber operations, and interacting with physical systems. The more consequential these systems become, the harder it will be to separate the safety debate from questions of market power, national security, and who ultimately controls the development of the technology.