Elon Musk, on Tuesday, head of Tesla and SpaceX, threatened to litigate Apple for unfairly favoring the OpenAI app on its App Store.
Musk alleged that this bias blocked his AI business, xAI, from getting a number one position on the App Store.
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.
The competition between Erion Musk's xAI and OpenAI has escalated, especially with their primary models — Grok and ChatGPT. In September, xAI announced Grok 4, which claimed to have improved performance over its competitors. Since then, xAI has released new tools like Grok Imagine for image and video generation, as well as personal companion chatbots. Grok has jumped from 60th to second place in Apple's Productivity category with the new features. The app provides a limited number of free daily queries before requiring a subscription.
ChatGPT has, for much of the last year, had a leading presence, often 1st or 2nd overall in Apple ranking. Musk claims that this presence is not entirely organic and claims that Apple favored ChatGPT by featuring it prominently in App Store editorial content, and incorporated OpenAI technology in its Apple Intelligence features — for example, Siri and integrated writing tools.
Polarizing timing added to the competitive nature. The day before dropping GPT-5, OpenAI gave away huge bonuses to around 1000 employees — about one-third of its full-time staff. GPT-5 is generally available for everyone, and Plus subscribers have greater use caps, and Pro subscribers can use GPT-5 Pro, which has extended reasoning capabilities that allow it to provide longer and more precise answers.
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