Musk corporations sue Apple and OpenAI, alleging they damage competitors

Two Elon Musk-backed companies have formally sued Apple and OpenAI, accusing them of becoming a member of forces illegally to dam threats from potential opponents.

The lawsuit, filed within the US by X and xAI, takes goal at Apple’s choice to combine OpenAI’s chatbot into the working methods of its smartphones, an unique association that it says violated competitors legislation.

The submitting makes good on a risk Musk had lobbed in opposition to the 2 tech giants earlier this month, when he alleged that Apple favoured OpenAI in its app retailer rankings.

Apple didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark, whereas OpenAI mentioned the submitting was “consistent with Mr Musk’s ongoing pattern of harassment”.

Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman based OpenAI collectively in 2015.

But the 2 have since grow to be bitter rivals, with Mr Musk accusing Mr Altman of main OpenAI too removed from its founding within the identify of public good.

Their fights have intensified as Musk has launched his personal AI corporations, together with xAI and Grok, a chatbot different.

In the lawsuit, filed in federal court docket in Texas, Musk’s corporations declare “there is no valid business reason for the Apple-OpenAI deal to be exclusive” – arguing that the 2024 association has made it more durable to compete and gave OpenAI entry to the prompts and exercise of hundreds of thousands of Apple prospects.

It says the deal additionally gave the ChatGPT app an edge within the App retailer, “boosting its downloads relative to other generative AI chatbots”.

“The Apple-OpenAI arrangement has foreclosed competition among generative AI chatbots, deprived competing generative AI chatbots of scale, and reduced quality and innovation,” the 2 corporations mentioned within the lawsuit. “All of these impacts have, in turn, helped OpenAI and Apple maintain their monopolies.”

OpenAI controls roughly 80% of the generative AI chatbot market within the US, in response to the lawsuit, whereas Apple claims about 65% of the smartphone market.

Its tie-ups with different tech giants and app retailer practices have been the topic of quite a few authorized battles, together with a high-profile anti-monopoly lawsuit in opposition to Google.

Apple has beforehand defended its app retailer practices, saying they have been “fair and free of bias”. Several ChatGPT rivals corresponding to DeepSeek and Perplexity have topped the App Store charts at varied factors since 2024.

The firm was additionally not too long ago reported to be in talks with Google over utilizing the corporate’s Gemini chatbot to assist energy its voice assistant, Siri.