Elon Musk’s xAI Sues Apple and OpenAI Over App Retailer Rankings

Elon Musk’s xAI filed a lawsuit towards Apple and OpenAI on Monday, accusing the businesses of behaving like monopolies and claiming Apple deprioritized ChatGPT rivals like Grok within the App Retailer.

“It is a story of two monopolists becoming a member of forces to make sure their continued dominance in a world quickly pushed by essentially the most highly effective expertise humanity has ever created: synthetic intelligence,” the lawsuit alleges. “Working in tandem, Defendants Apple and OpenAI have locked up markets to keep up their monopolies and forestall innovators like X and xAI from competing.”

Grok is at the moment ranked third within the App Retailer totally free productiveness apps—behind solely ChatGPT and Gmail. The ‘uncensored’ chatbot can be built-in into Musk’s social platform X, which is the primary free information app within the App Retailer.

The lawsuit takes explicit subject with Apple’s integration of ChatGPT into the iOS working system final yr. “Which means if iPhone customers need to use a generative AI chatbot for key duties on their units, they don’t have any selection however to make use of ChatGPT, even when they would favor to make use of extra revolutionary and imaginative merchandise like xAI’s Grok,” the lawsuit claims. Whereas Apple has not introduced integrations with different chatbots, the OpenAI partnership was not named as an unique at launch. Nothing in Apple’s working system prevents iPhone customers from accessing chatbots like Grok.

“This newest submitting is in step with Mr Musk’s ongoing sample of harassment,” mentioned OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wooden in an announcement to WIRED. Apple didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.

The impact of this alleged collusion is that customers have much less selection, xAI claims. “These results available on the market—much less competitors, much less scale essential to compete, much less funding, and fewer innovation—in the end hurt shoppers by way of decrease high quality, much less selection, and better costs than would exist within the but-for world with out Defendants’ anticompetitive conduct,” the lawsuit reads.

Musk was a founding member of the OpenAI workforce earlier than he left in 2018, ultimately founding a rival AI agency within the type of xAI. An e mail to xAI’s press line requesting touch upon the lawsuit bounced again.

At a dinner in San Francisco earlier this month, a journalist requested OpenAI CEO Sam Altman how he thinks in regards to the relationship between OpenAI and Apple. “Perhaps they’ve determined, look, we’re not going to atone for fashions—there’s sufficient competitors,” a journalist mentioned.
“Is there a spot you need to be to be their major accomplice?”

Altman didn’t reply the query straight. “Apple’s my favourite tech firm that isn’t OpenAI,” he mentioned. OpenAI is at the moment working with famed former Apple designer Jony Ive on an AI {hardware} product. Altman mentioned on the dinner the product could be a “new computing paradigm,” although he declined to share particulars of the venture.

This isn’t the primary time Musk has sued OpenAI. In 2024, Musk filed a criticism towards the ChatGPT maker, alleging the corporate had deserted its founding mission of creating AI to profit humanity by pursuing a for-profit construction. Whereas the corporate was initially designed as a nonprofit, it later created a for-profit subsidiary for fundraising functions. The corporate is within the means of transitioning that subsidiary to change into a public profit company—a transfer that’s crucial to OpenAI receiving billions of {dollars} from SoftBank.