Elon Musk’s xAI sues Apple and OpenAI, accuses them of conspiring to block AI competition

Elon Musk has taken his fight with Apple and OpenAI into the courtroom. On Monday, Musk’s AI startup xAI filed a lawsuit in a U.S. federal court in Texas, accusing the two companies of illegally conspiring to shut out competition in artificial intelligence, Reuters reported.

The lawsuit caps weeks of tension that Musk has been airing on his social media platform X. Earlier this month, he accused Apple of manipulating its App Store in favor of OpenAI’s ChatGPT while sidelining his own Grok chatbot.

“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,” Musk posted on X

He followed with another jab: “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?”

Musk has argued that Grok is being deliberately overlooked. “Grok is the smartest AI in the world on the toughest tests and just came first by far in coding, but is not mentioned at all under ‘AI’ by Apple!” he posted. The omission struck a nerve, especially since Grok recently climbed to the No. 5 spot among all free apps on the App Store, leapfrogging Google’s offering. ChatGPT, meanwhile, has held the No. 1 slot and enjoys prominent placement in Apple’s “Must-Have Apps” list, where OpenAI’s new GPT-5 release is featured at the very top.

But not everyone buys Musk’s version of events. X Community Notes pointed out that DeepSeek reached the No. 1 spot on the App Store in January 2025, months after Apple announced its OpenAI deal, and that Perplexity hit No. 1 in India as recently as July 18, 2025. “Both of these occurred after the OpenAI–Apple partnership announced on June 10, 2024,” one note said, undermining Musk’s claim that no AI company other than OpenAI could break through.

Apple has declined to comment on the accusations. For its part, OpenAI hasn’t stayed quiet. After Musk aired his grievances, CEO Sam Altman fired back on X: “This is a remarkable claim 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.”

The animosity runs deeper than app rankings. Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but left in 2018, and he has since accused the Microsoft-backed company of abandoning its founding mission to build AI for the benefit of humanity. That dispute has already landed OpenAI in Musk’s crosshairs through a separate lawsuit filed earlier this year.

The Apple fight is a new front. Musk had threatened last year to ban Apple devices at his companies if the iPhone maker integrated OpenAI’s technology directly into its operating system, calling it “an unacceptable security violation.” His lawsuit now lands at a time when Apple is already under pressure from regulators. The U.S. Department of Justice sued the company last year for allegedly running a monopoly on the iPhone, and courts have forced it to loosen some of its App Store restrictions.

The stakes are high for Musk. Grok is his answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and he has cast the fight as one about fairness and competition. For Apple and OpenAI, it’s another legal and reputational battle to manage as scrutiny around AI grows louder.

For now, Musk’s war of words has become a war in court—one that pulls in Apple, his former allies at OpenAI, and the future of how AI apps compete for dominance on the devices billions of people use every day.