Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI is suing Apple and OpenAI, as reported by Reuters. The suit accuses the companies of illegally conspiring to stop rival AI companies from getting a fair shot on the App Store, alleging they have “locked up markets to maintain their monopolies and prevent innovators like X and xAI from competing.”
The complaint suggests that Apple and OpenAI have been conspiring to suppress xAI’s products on the App Store. “If not for its exclusive deal with OpenAI, Apple would have no reason to refrain from more prominently featuring the X app and the Grok app in its App Store,” xAI told Reuters.
Apple has integrated OpenAI’s ChatGPT into several of its products, but it remains to be seen if that has translated to any anticompetitive practices. It’s worth noting that rival AI apps like DeepSeek and Perplexity have both spent time on the top of App Store charts since this partnership began, according to CNBC.
This lawsuit comes after Musk threatened legal action a couple of weeks back after making similar accusations regarding Apple and OpenAI. Apple has yet to respond to the complaint but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to Musk’s original allegation by calling it “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 is likely referencing various studies that indicate Musk made huge changes to the X algorithm to favor his personal posts and posts by conservative commentators. He has also threatened to “fix” the Community Notes feature on X, which is a crowdsourced fact-checking tool. OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood told The Verge that today’s lawsuit “is consistent with Mr. Musk’s ongoing pattern of harassment.”
xAI also brought this lawsuit to the Northern District of Texas Fort Worth Division, which is a notoriously conservative arm of the federal court. This is where Musk typically steers his various lawsuits, in a practice some refer to as “judge shopping.”
