Elon Musk has surprisingly made good on one of his promises. Earlier this month, Musk accused Apple of rigging the App Store rankings and threatened to sue the company for this “unequivocal antitrust violation.”
“Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store,” Musk posted at the time.
In a Texas court on Monday, Musk’s xAI officially filed a lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI, accusing the two companies of colluding to prevent competition in the AI industry.
From the lawsuit:
Apple and OpenAI’s exclusive arrangement has made ChatGPT the only generative AI chatbot integrated into the iPhone. This means that if iPhone users want to use a generative AI chatbot for key tasks on their devices, they have no choice but to use ChatGPT, even if they would prefer to use more innovative and imaginative products like xAI’s Grok. As a result of Apple and OpenAI’s exclusive arrangement, ChatGPT is the only generative AI chatbot that benefits from billions of user prompts originating from hundreds of millions of iPhones. This makes it hard for competitors of ChatGPT’s generative AI chatbot and super apps powered by generative AI chatbots to scale and innovate. Worse still, Apple has taken further steps to protect its monopoly in smartphones and to preference OpenAI by deprioritizing the apps of competing generative AI chatbots and super apps in its App Store rankings, and it has dragged out its App Store app review processes for those competitors.
The lawsuit cites App Store rankings and editorial features as evidence of the collusion between Apple and OpenAI. For instance, the lawsuit takes issue with the xAI app never appearing in Apple’s “Must-Have Apps” guide on the App Store.
Apple responded to Musk’s initial posts on X earlier this month with the following statement:
The App Store is designed to be fair and free of bias. We feature thousands of apps through charts, algorithmic recommendations, and curated lists selected by experts using objective criteria. Our goal is to offer safe discovery for users and valuable opportunities for developers, collaborating with many to increase app visibility in rapidly evolving categories.
Other AI apps have reached the top of the App Store charts since Apple and OpenAI announced their partnership in June 2024. For example, DeepSeek hit #1 on the App Store in January of this year.
Apple has teased the possibility of adding other AI integrations to Siri multiple times. At WWDC 2024, Craig Federighi said the company has explored adding other models like Google Gemini. At WWDC this year, Apple rolled out a new version of Xcode that supports integration with Anthropic alongside ChatGPT.
The company has not yet responded to Musk’s xAI actually filing the lawsuit today.
You can read the full lawsuit below.