Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, attends the Viva Technology conference at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 16, 2023.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Two of Elon Musk’s companies sued Apple and OpenAI on Monday, accusing the pair of an “anticompetitive scheme” to thwart artificial intelligence rivals.
The lawsuit, filed by Musk’s AI startup xAI and his social media platform X, alleges Apple and OpenAI have “colluded” to maintain monopolies in the smartphone and generative AI markets.
It also accuses Apple of deprioritizing so-called “super apps” and generative AI chatbot competitors, such as xAI’s Grok, in its App Store rankings, while favoring OpenAI by integrating its ChatGPT chatbot into Apple products.
“In a desperate bid to protect its smartphone monopoly, Apple has joined forces with the company that most benefits from inhibiting competition and innovation in AI: OpenAI, a monopolist in the market for generative AI chatbots,” according to the complaint, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.
Musk earlier this month threatened to sue Apple for “an unequivocal antitrust violation,” saying in a post on X that the company “is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store.”
OpenAI declined to comment. Representatives from Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to Musk’s post on X: “This is a remarkable claim given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn’t like.”
An Apple spokesperson previously said its App Store was designed to be “fair and free of bias,” and that the company features “thousands of apps” using a variety of signals.
Apple last year partnered with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into iPhone, iPad, Mac laptop and desktop products.
Several users replied to Musk’s post on X via its Community Notes feature saying that rival chatbot apps such as DeepSeek and Perplexity were ranked No. 1 on the App Store after Apple and OpenAI announced their partnership.
The lawsuit is the latest twist in an ongoing clash between Musk and Altman. Musk co-founded OpenAI alongside Altman in 2015, before leaving the startup in 2018 due to disagreements over OpenAI’s direction.
Musk sued OpenAI and Altman last year, accusing them of breach of contract by putting commercial interests ahead of its original mission to develop AI “for the benefit of humanity broadly.”
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