X owner Elon Musk announced plans to sue Apple on Monday for allegedly favoring OpenAI over his Grok artificial intelligence chatbot app in the company’s App Store.
Musk accused Apple of violating antitrust laws and putting Grok at a disadvantage by showing bias toward Sam Altman’s OpenAI. OpenAI’s ChatGPT was ranked first on the App Store while Grok was ranked fifth as of Tuesday morning. Apple’s App Store ranked TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, ChatGPT, and Tinder as its top five “Must Haves,” in that order.
“Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation,” Musk said in a post to X, adding that his xAI, which created Grok, will “take immediate legal action.”
In another post on Monday evening, Musk alleged the Apple Store was also unfairly rating X.
“Hey @Apple App Store, why do you refuse to put either X or Grok in your ‘Must Have’ section when X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps?” Musk questioned. “Are you playing politics? What gives? Inquiring minds want to know.”
Musk’s AI startup, xAI, is a direct competitor to Altman’s OpenAI. Apple last year collaborated with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into its iPhone, iPad, Mac laptop, and desktop products.
Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015 before splitting off from the company partly over ideological differences and concerns that the direction Altman and others were taking AI violated ethical boundaries. In 2023, Musk launched xAI as a competitor to OpenAI and released Grok 4, its latest large language model, last month. Grok has seen major success, leading the Pentagon to announce it would adopt the technology for use in the U.S. military, even as the Trump administration announced plans to partner with Chat GPT.
Since parting ways with Altman and launching Grok, Musk has attempted to take control of OpenAI, mounting a lawsuit in 2024 alleging that the company had committed fraud, breach of contract, and fiduciary duty due to efforts to change its corporate structure. Altman’s push to make OpenAI a for-profit institution, Musk suggested, puts profit maximization front and center, taking AI in a “dangerous” direction that erodes ethical boundaries and protects it from public accountability.
Altman has rebuffed Musk’s attacks on OpenAI, including in a response to the xAI CEO’s latest accusations that Apple is tilting the scales in favor of OpenAI.
“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,” Altman said Tuesday morning, adding that the ChatGPT maker would remain “focused on making great products.”
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Musk shot back at OpenAI with a stream of messages on X the same day.
“Apple is the gateway to the Internet for half of America. They are making it impossible for any other AI company to succeed by relentlessly promoting OpenAI in every way possible!” he said, adding in another, “Apple behaves like it’s owned by OpenAI – why?”
