Two of Elon Musk’s companies have filed a lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI, accusing the pair of colluding to block competition in the generative AI market — reports CNBC.
On Monday, Musk’s AI startup xAI and his social media platform X filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, alleging Apple and OpenAI engaged in an “anticompetitive scheme” to maintain monopolies in smartphones and AI chatbots.
The lawsuit alleges that Apple has been lowering the visibility of certain “super apps” and generative AI chatbot competitors — such as xAI’s Grok — in its App Store rankings while giving preferential treatment to 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,” the complaint reads.
This comes just weeks after Musk said Apple was “behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store,” while threatening legal action. Musk was particularly miffed that neither X nor Grok, xAI’s AI chatbot integrated into X and Tesla vehicles, was featured in the App Store’s curated “Must Have” section. This, despite X being the No. 1 free news app in the U.S. and Grok ranking fifth among all free apps nationwide.
An OpenAI spokesperson dismissed the case, saying: “This latest filing is consistent with Mr. Musk’s ongoing pattern of harassment.” Apple previously said the App Store is “fair and free of bias,” featuring “thousands of apps” ranked using a variety of signals.
Apple last year partnered with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into iPhone, iPad, and Mac. After Musk’s earlier lawsuit threat, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman fired back: “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.”
Notably, several rival chatbot apps like DeepSeek and Perplexity were briefly ranked No. 1 on the App Store following Apple’s ChatGPT integration.
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 alongside Altman but left in 2018. He also sued OpenAI and Altman last year, accusing them of putting profits ahead of the company’s original mission to develop AI “for the benefit of humanity broadly.”
The latest lawsuit marks yet another front in Musk’s long-running battles with Apple and OpenAI.
