xAI will sue Apple for allegedly favoring ChatGPT on App Store

Elon Musk, Founder and CEO of xAI, has announced that his AI company is planning to sue Apple for favoring ChatGPT over other AI apps listed on the App Store.

Musk criticised Apple for not suggesting X or Grok in must-have apps for its devices. He also blamed this approach is making any other AI company, except OpenAI, claim the number one spot on the App Store. “Which is an unequivocal antitrust violation,” Musk wrote on X.

In 2024, Apple and OpenAI formally announced a partnership to integrate ChatGPT services into Apple Intelligence, a suite of generative AI features. After this update, all of the latest iPhones and other Apple devices come with pre-installed ChatGPT services integrated directly into Siri voice assistant.

Last year, Apple promised to launch its most powerful and intelligent Siri model to the world, but failed to deliver. In the end, the company ended up relying more on the AI company to fulfill its current needs. The iPhone maker’s plan around AI and LLM continues to receive setbacks as its senior researcher has been poached by Meta.

On the other hand, xAI is rapidly pushing new features to iOS users, both Grok and X apps have a large user base, and new updates are dropping almost every day. Recently, features including Companions and Imagine video generation have led more eyes to Grok than its competitors.

Despite these allegations, we have to also bring a fact into the spotlight: DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, reached number 1 on the App Store in January with its 600B-parameter DeepSeek-V3 model. It somehow favors Apple’s app ranking system can support non-OpenAI AI apps and weakens Musk’s argument unless evidence shows deliberate suppression of X or Grok apps.