Elon Musk’s xAI Sues Apple and OpenAI Over Claims It Is Being Shut Out

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence firm, xAI, sued Apple and OpenAI on Monday, accusing Apple of manipulating its App Store rankings to give preferential treatment to OpenAI.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, said that Apple and OpenAI “locked up markets to maintain their monopolies and prevent innovators like X and xAI from competing.”

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for OpenAI said the lawsuit was “consistent with Mr. Musk’s ongoing pattern of harassment.”

Mr. Musk has been threatening legal action against Apple for several weeks. In posts on X, his social media site, Mr. Musk said Apple was preventing xAI’s chatbot app, Grok, from rising to the top of its download charts. Instead, he said that Apple appeared to be allowing only ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot, to attain the top spot.

Those complaints followed the release of the latest version of Grok. At first, Mr. Musk posted about how well the chatbot was doing in the App Store rankings. But when it didn’t rise to the No. 1 spot, Mr. Musk said on X that Apple had committed “an unequivocal antitrust violation” and added that Apple was “behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any A.I. company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store.”

Apple announced a deal with OpenAI last year to integrate ChatGPT into its services. In its lawsuit, xAI claimed the deal would allow ChatGPT to pull further ahead in the race to build artificial intelligence. OpenAI would gain access to billions of queries posed by iPhone users, valuable data that helps A.I. models learn and improve, the lawsuit said.

Mr. Musk co-founded OpenAI, but left in 2018, citing disagreements with the other founders over the company’s direction. He sued OpenAI last year, accusing the company and two of its founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, of breaching the effort’s founding contract by putting commercial interests ahead of the public good. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI for copyright infringement. The company has denied wrongdoing.)

Mr. Musk has been embroiled in a yearslong feud with Mr. Altman, saying his onetime business partner focused on his own enrichment rather than safe development of A.I. In February, Mr. Musk led a group of investors in a $97.4 billion bid to take over OpenAI but was rebuffed.

The two men regularly trade barbs on social media. This month, Mr. Altman said in a post on X that Mr. Musk’s claims that Apple favored OpenAI were “remarkable.” Mr. Altman added that Mr. Musk’s accusations against Apple were hypocritical, “given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn’t like.”

Mr. Musk’s new legal fight follows his departure from Washington, where he spent the beginning of the year aiding the Trump administration in a cost-cutting effort he named the Department of Government Efficiency. The initiative worried investors in Tesla, Mr. Musk’s automaker, and raised questions about whether he was ignoring his businesses.

In recent months, Mr. Musk has sought to appear re-engaged. He has said he is “24/7 at work,” appeared onstage last month for a lengthy demo of Grok’s capabilities and posted a constant stream of updates on X about his businesses.

Going up against Apple is a risk. The company is hugely powerful, vetting the apps of xAI and other companies to determine whether they meet Apple’s standards and rejecting those that don’t measure up.

In 2022, Mr. Musk accused Apple of sabotaging his social media company by threatening to remove its app from the App Store. But after a meeting with Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, Mr. Musk called the spat a “misunderstanding.”

By suing Apple in Texas, Mr. Musk is continuing a mission to bring his legal disputes into the state’s venues. After a Delaware judge voided his Tesla pay package in 2024, Mr. Musk began shifting several of his companies’ headquarters to Texas to avoid Delaware jurisdiction. He also updated X’s terms of service last year to require users to bring any legal disputes against the company in Texas court.