Elon Musk’s xAI Sues Apple and OpenAI Over Claims It Is Being Shut Out

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence firm, xAI, sued Apple and OpenAI on Monday, accusing Apple of manipulating its App Store rankings to give preferential treatment to OpenAI.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, said that Apple and OpenAI “locked up markets to maintain their monopolies and prevent innovators like X and xAI from competing.”

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for OpenAI said the lawsuit was “consistent with Mr. Musk’s ongoing pattern of harassment.”

Mr. Musk has been threatening legal action against Apple for several weeks. In posts on X, his social media site, Mr. Musk said Apple was preventing xAI’s chatbot app, Grok, from rising to the top of its download charts. Instead, he said that Apple appeared to be allowing only ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot, to attain the top spot.

Those complaints followed the release of the latest version of Grok. At first, Mr. Musk posted about how well the chatbot was doing in the App Store rankings. But when it didn’t rise to the No. 1 spot, Mr. Musk said on X that Apple had committed “an unequivocal antitrust violation” and added that Apple was “behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any A.I. company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store.”

Apple announced a deal with OpenAI last year to integrate ChatGPT into its services. In its lawsuit, xAI claimed the deal would allow ChatGPT to pull further ahead in the race to build artificial intelligence. OpenAI would gain access to billions of queries posed by iPhone users, valuable data that helps A.I. models learn and improve, the lawsuit said.