Musk’s xAI May Take Legal Action Against Apple: “Unequivocal Antitrust Violation”

In the consumer AI space, you have apps for OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. You can download these apps on your phone and use the AI on the go. However, Elon Musk isn’t too happy with the position that Grok is sitting in the Apple App Store, and is threatening that xAI will take legal action.

Musk’s xAI to take legal action against Apple App Store

At the moment, Grok sits in fifth place in the overall App Store rankings. Before that, Grok was in 60th position before climbing to 29th place, according to the data from App Figures. Now, it’s sitting in fifth, which seems like a good thing. However, Musk isn’t happy with the Apple App Store and wants his xAI company to sue.

It appears that Musk believes that Grok deserves to be the number one AI app in the App Store. He also thinks that Apple is somehow preventing Grok from reaching that position. “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.”

Apple has, in the past, featured OpenAI’s ChatGPT quite heavily. This is because both companies have a partnership. The company announced earlier this year that ChatGPT would be integrated into iOS. This means that if Apple Intelligence can’t handle certain requests, ChatGPT will take over.

It has been rumored that Apple is planning to allow alternate AI models, such as Google’s Gemini. However, to date, ChatGPT is still the only option.

Why is Musk so upset?

It is unclear why Musk is so incensed about this. However, maybe he’s not thrilled about Apple and OpenAI’s partnership. Musk was one of OpenAI’s co-founders, but ultimately left the company. Since then, he has had several verbal sparrings with OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, over the direction of the company.

Musk has since followed up with a post on X asking, “Hey @Apple App Store, why do you refuse to put either 𝕏 or Grok in your “Must Have” section when 𝕏 is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps? Are you playing politics? What gives? Inquiring minds want to know.”

It is unclear if Musk and xAI will follow through with their threats, so we’ll have to wait and see.