AI wars: Musk threatens Apple with a lawsuit for ignoring his Grok app
12 August 2025 13:13
Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has threatened Apple with a lawsuit over alleged antitrust violations related to the ranking of the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Grok application owned by his startup xAI. This is reported by "Komersant Ukrainian" with reference to CNBC.
“Apple is behaving in a way that makes it impossible for any AI company other than OpenAI to reach the first place in the App Store, which is a clear violation of antitrust law. xAI will take immediate legal action,”
– Musk wrote in a post on his social platform X.
Apple has not yet responded to this accusation.
“Why are you refusing to put X or Grok in the ‘Required Apps’ section when X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is ranked 5th among all apps? Are you playing politics?”
– Musk said in another post.
Conflict over the partnership with OpenAI
Last year, Apple entered into a deal with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into its iPhone, iPad, Mac laptops, and desktop computers. At the time, Musk stated:
“If Apple integrates OpenAI at the operating system level, then Apple devices will be banned from my companies. This is an unacceptable security breach.”
Prior to his legal threats against Apple, Musk was celebrating the fact that Grok had overtaken Google to become the fifth most popular free app in the App Store.
ChatGPT ranks first in the most popular free apps section of the US iOS store and is the only AI chatbot in Apple’s “Must Have” section. The App Store has also posted a link to download OpenAI’s new flagship AI model ChatGPT-5 at the top of the Apps section.
On Thursday, OpenAI unveiled GPT-5, its newest and most advanced large-scale AI model, following xAI’s release of its new Grok 4 chatbot last month.
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Long-running feud with OpenAI
Musk has been engaged in a long-running dispute with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which he co-founded in 2015. The billionaire resigned from the board of directors in 2018, four years after he declared that AI is “potentially more dangerous than nuclear weapons.”
He is now suing the Microsoft-backed startup and its CEO Sam Altman, claiming that they have abandoned OpenAI’s founding mission to develop artificial intelligence “for the benefit of all mankind.”
Robert Keel, who headed up xAI’s legal department, announced last week that he had left the company to spend more time with his family. In his announcement, Keel also acknowledged “differences in worldviews” with Musk.
OpenAI’s response
In response to Musk’s antitrust threats against Apple, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in X:
“This is a surprising statement given what I’ve heard about how Elon manipulates X to favor himself and his companies and harms competitors and people he doesn’t like.”
Previous antitrust cases against Apple
This is not the first time Apple has been accused of violating antitrust laws. In a landmark case, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the company last year over allegations of creating a monopoly in the iPhone ecosystem.
In June, a panel of judges also rejected Apple’s emergency application to halt changes to the App Store following a court ruling that the company can no longer charge fees for payment links within its apps and dictate to developers how these links should look.
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