Aug. 25 (UPI) — An Elon Musk-owned company on Monday sued OpenAI and tech giant Apple over alleged favoritism in artificial intelligence apps.
The lawsuit filed in a federal north Texas court by X and Musk’s xAI, an artificial intelligence startup Musk launched in 2023, accused Apple and OpenAI of an “anticompetitive scheme” and alleged the two companies “colluded” in order to keep a monopoly in the generative AI business markets.
“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,” according to court records.
Earlier this month, Musk threatened that xAI would “take immediate legal action” over what Musk characterized as an “unequivocal antitrust violation.”
Last year, Apple joined OpenAI to integrated its ChatGPT into Apple products.
Musk’s lawsuit accused Apple of deprioritizing other apps, including Grok by xAI, in Apple’s App Store while it allegedly favored OpenAI’s ChatGPT in Apple product integrations.
According to Apple, it features “thousands” of apps in the App Store through “charts, algorithmic recommendations and curated lists selected by experts using objective criteria,” a company spokesman previously stated.
On Monday, an Open AI spokesperson said this latest filing was “consistent with Mr. Musk’s ongoing pattern of harassment,” the company said in a statement.
“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,” OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman responded after Musk’s initial threat of legal action.
The ex-White House DOGE adviser left his Washington role earlier this summer amid murky results and scores of lawsuits in Musks’s wake stemming from his tenure at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency
It arrived as Musk-owned Telsa signed a more than $16 billion deal at the end of July to obtain semiconductor chips from Samsung.
