Elon Musk sues Apple and OpenAI, revealing his panic over OpenAI dominance

After a public outburst over Grok's App Store rankings, on Monday, Elon Musk followed through on his threat to sue Apple and OpenAI.

At first, Musk appeared fixated on ChatGPT consistently topping Apple's "Must Have" app list—which Grok has never made—claiming Apple seemed to preference OpenAI, an Apple partner, over all chatbot rivals. But Musk's filing shows that the X and xAI owner isn't just trying to push for more Grok downloads on iPhones—he's concerned that Apple and OpenAI have teamed up to completely dash his "everything app" dreams, which was the reason he bought Twitter.

At this point appearing to be genuinely panicked about OpenAI's insurmountable lead in the chatbot market, Musk has specifically alleged that an agreement integrating ChatGPT into the iOS violated antitrust and unfair competition laws. Allegedly, the conspiracy is designed to protect Apple's smartphone monopoly and block out AI rivals to lock in OpenAI's dominance in the chatbot market.

As Musk sees it, Apple is supposedly so worried that X will use Grok to create a "super app" that replaces the need for a sophisticated smartphone that the iPhone maker decided to partner with OpenAI to limit X and xAI innovation. The complaint quotes Apple executive Eddy Cue as expressing "worries that AI might destroy Apple’s smartphone business," due to patterns observed in foreign markets where super apps exist, like WeChat in China.

"In a desperate bid to protect its smartphone monopoly, Apple has joined forces with the company that most benefits from inhibiting competition and innovation in AI: OpenAI, a monopolist in the market for generative AI chatbots," Musk's lawsuit alleged.

The problematic deal doesn't just set ChatGPT as the only chatbot linked to Siri and other naive iPhone features, the lawsuit alleged. It also gives OpenAI—which X noted already controls at least 80 percent of the chatbot market—exclusive access to billions of prompts that OpenAI can use as valuable training data to cement its lead.