Elon Musk is (once again) going after Apple, this time accusing the company of an “unequivocal antitrust violation” for allegedly favoring OpenAI in the App Store’s AI rankings. Here are the details.
A bit of context
Last month, xAI released Grok 4, its latest large language model, promising major performance gains over leading competitors. Since then, the company has also rolled out features like Grok Imagine, its image and video generator, as well as customizable “companion” chatbots.
During the same time period, according to data from App Figures, the Grok app climbed from around 60th to 29th place in the overall App Store rankings last week.
Earlier today, xAI made Grok 4 free for users worldwide, helping the app climb further to fifth place in the overall App Store rankings, and second in the Productivity category.
Still, that hasn’t been enough to dethrone OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has spent the better part of the past year hovering at, or near, the top of Apple’s charts.
For the past year, Apple has also repeatedly featured ChatGPT in its App Store editorial content. More significantly, it partnered with OpenAI as part of its new Apple Intelligence rollout, which includes direct Siri integration and support for the Writing Tools feature.
But what about the lawsuit?
Earlier tonight, Elon Musk posted the following on X:
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.
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