Elon Musk’s xAI Holdings Corp. today sued Apple Inc. and OpenAI for allegedly engaging in anticompetitive practices.

The move comes a few weeks after Musk previewed the complaint in a post on X. He accused Apple of breaching antitrust rules by making it impossible for OpenAI competitors to top the App Store’s ranking of the most downloaded apps. In response, X users pointed out that DeepSeek briefly held the top spot earlier this year.

The App Store is the first focus of today’s lawsuit. The complaint, which was filed with a federal court in Fort Worth, claims that Apple manipulated the App Store to give OpenAI an unfair edge over rivals such as xAI’s Grok app. Furthermore, xAI charges that Apple spent too much time reviewing updates to Grok.

“Defendants have caused fewer Texas iPhone users to download Plaintiffs’ apps by manipulating App Store rankings and delaying approval for updates to xAI’s Grok app,” xAI wrote in the complaint. 

The second focus of the lawsuit is a product collaboration that the iPhone maker launched with OpenAI last June. As part of the partnership, Apple has integrated ChatGPT into Apple Intelligence, a set of artificial intelligence features built into its devices. The feature suite enables users to generate text, ask ChatGPT questions and perform certain other tasks.

Today’s lawsuit charges that the partnership gives OpenAI an unfair competitive advantage. 

The prompts that consumers enter into Apple Intelligence can be turned into AI training datasets. According to xAI, those datasets could be used to boost the quality of large language models’ output. The company goes on to argue that Apple has given OpenAI exclusive access to the datasets and thereby harmed the competition. 

“Plaintiffs have been foreclosed from a significant number of generative AI chatbot prompts, deprived of scale, and thwarted in their abilities to innovate and improve the quality and competitiveness of their offerings,” reads the lawsuit.

The complaint also charges that the Apple-OpenAI partnership harms competition in the smartphone market. According to xAI, the partnership is holding back the development of AI-powered “super apps” that can perform a wide range of tasks. The company argues that such super apps would enable low-cost handsets to compete more effectively with the iPhone. 

“Customers in the smartphone market are harmed by this conduct because they cannot readily switch to less expensive smartphones and use generative AI chatbots and super apps that match or replace the features offered by the iPhone,” xAI argues. 

The complaint comes about a year after Musk sued OpenAI for alleged breach of contract. In response, the ChatGPT developer recently filed a countersuit against Musk that accused him of using unlawful tactics to harm its business. The case will go to a jury trial next March. 

Photo: SpaceX