Elon Musk's AI Company Sues Apple and OpenAI

The lawsuit accuses Apple of restricting access to top spots on the App Store to other competing AI chatbot apps.

Mr. Elon Musk speaks at an event at the White House on May 30, 2025 - Photo: REUTERS

Billionaire Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI on August 25 sued Apple and OpenAI, accusing the two companies of illegally hindering competition in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

In its lawsuit, xAI argues that its relationship with Apple makes OpenAI’s ChatGPT the only generative AI chatbot that can benefit from billions of user commands originating from hundreds of millions of iPhones. This, xAI says, allows OpenAI to use the commands and responses to improve its model, giving it a distinct advantage.

The lawsuit also accuses Apple of restricting access to top spots on the App Store to other competing AI chatbot apps.

In an effort to protect its smartphone monopoly, Apple has teamed up with the company that benefits most from stifling competition and innovation in AI, OpenAI, according to xAI.

xAI also claims that Apple protected its partnership with OpenAI by preventing better promotion of xAI's rival apps, notably Grok and the social network X. This helps Apple prevent AI companies from gaining the scale that would make their services more useful and could threaten Apple's smartphone business.

An Apple spokesperson did not respond to a request for an official response.

Apple has previously said that the App Store is designed to be unbiased, and the company has defended the fairness of its partnership with OpenAI. Apple executives have said that they only partner with products they consider to be the best in order to provide the best user experience.

Meanwhile, OpenAI criticized the lawsuit as fitting into “Mr. Musk’s longstanding pattern of harassment.” Mr. Musk previously sued OpenAI to prevent the startup from converting to a for-profit company, arguing that OpenAI had abandoned its mission of prioritizing the interests of humanity in developing AI.

The lawsuit appears to be modeled after a successful antitrust case brought against Google by the U.S. Justice Department and several states. Federal Judge Amit P. Mehta ruled on August 5 that Google had abused its monopoly in traditional online search, in part by locking down distribution through the iPhone. xAI argues that OpenAI is doing the same thing in AI-based search.

Google pays Apple more than $20 billion a year to be the default search engine on its Safari browser. A judge is expected to rule in the coming days on anti-competitive measures and could ban such payments.

The lawsuit filed by the US Department of Justice and several states against Google also looks closely at Apple's potential AI partnerships.

VNA

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/cong-ty-ai-cua-ong-elon-musk-kien-apple-va-openai-20250826081848176.htm