Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence firm, xAI, sued Apple on Monday, accusing the company of manipulating its App Store rankings to give preferential treatment to a top competitor, OpenAI.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, said that Apple and OpenAI “locked up markets to maintain their monopolies and prevent innovators like X and xAI from competing.”
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for OpenAI said the lawsuit was “consistent with Mr. Musk’s ongoing pattern of harassment.”
Mr. Musk has been threatening legal action against Apple for several weeks. In posts on X, his social media site, Mr. Musk said Apple was preventing xAI’s chatbot app, Grok, from rising to the top of its download charts.
Those complaints followed the release of the latest version of Grok. At first, Mr. Musk posted about how well the chatbot was doing in the App Store rankings. But when it didn’t rise to the No. 1 spot, Mr. Musk said on X that Apple had committed “an unequivocal antitrust violation” and added that Apple was “behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any A.I. company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store.”
Mr. Musk co-founded OpenAI, but left in 2018, citing disagreements with the other founders over the company’s direction. He sued OpenAI last year, accusing the company and two of its founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, of breaching the effort’s founding contract by putting commercial interests ahead of the public good.
Apple announced a deal with OpenAI last year to integrate its chatbot, ChatGPT, into its services. In its lawsuit, xAI claimed the deal would allow ChatGPT to pull further ahead in the race to build artificial intelligence. OpenAI would gain access to billions of queries posed by iPhone users, valuable data that helps A.I. models learn and improve, the lawsuit said.
(The New York Times has also sued OpenAI for copyright infringement. The company has denied wrongdoing.)
Kate Conger is a technology reporter based in San Francisco. She can be reached at [email protected].
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