Why the Runlayer Lawsuit Against Rippling Exposes a Major Risk for AI Startups

When a software company valued at $13.5 billion enters a fresh market, it typically deploys a massive engineering budget. When HR and payroll giant Rippling chose to build an integration gateway using Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP), it allegedly skipped the expensive research step. A lawsuit filed by Runlayer, an early-stage infrastructure startup, claims Rippling used an active product evaluation window to copy Runlayer's proprietary design and build a competing internal tool.