Elon Musk alleges Apple favours OpenAI over xAi, threatens legal action

Elon Musk accused Apple of unfairly boosting OpenAI’s ChatGPT in its App Store, hindering xAI’s Grok from reaching the top spot. Calling it an antitrust violation, Musk vowed legal action amid intensifying AI competition and Apple’s deep integration with OpenAI

New Delhi: Tesla and SpaceX owner Elon Musk on Tuesday threatened legal action against tech giant Apple, alleging that the company is unjustly favouring the OpenAI application in its App Store. Musk’s own AI startup, xAI, was not able to claim the number one spot on the App Store due to this favouritism, he alleged.

Musk wrote 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. xAI will take immediate legal action.” “Unfortunately, what choice do we have? Apple didn’t just put their thumb on the scale, they put their whole body!” he said in an another post.

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The accusation came as competition intensified between Grok, xAI’s large language model, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. xAI launched Grok 4 last month and claimed notable performance improvements over competitors.

The AI firm has since added features like Grok Imagine for image and video generation and personalised companion chatbots. Grok rose from the 60th rank to second place in Apple’s Productivity category. The free tier allows only a limited number of queries per day, after which it requires a subscription. ChatGPT has consistently been ranked in first or second position in Apple’s overall charts for much of the past year.

Musk had alleged that Apple’s support for ChatGPT is not driven by organic popularity. Apple has highlighted ChatGPT in App Store editorial content and incorporated OpenAI’s technology into its Apple Intelligence rollout, integrating it directly into Siri and writing tools.

Last week, on the eve of GPT-5’s launch, ChatGPT maker OpenAI announced massive bonus payouts for about 1,000 employees, which is approximately one-third of its full-time workforce. GPT‑5 is available to all users, with Plus subscribers getting more usage and Pro subscribers getting access to GPT‑5 Pro, a version with extended reasoning for even more comprehensive and accurate answers.