Musk is now suing Apple and OpenAI. On Monday, Musk’s legal team filed a lawsuit accusing Apple and OpenAI of colluding to cement their monopolies over the fast-growing AI chatbot market. It comes just weeks after Musk publicly attacked Apple for boosting OpenAI’s ChatGPT while his own chatbot Grok has remained absent from the App Store’s “Must Have” list.

Filed on behalf of Musk’s companies X (Twitter’s new name) and xAI (his AI startup), the lawsuit goes well beyond complaints about App Store rankings. The complaint alleges that Apple and OpenAI have entered into an exclusive agreement giving ChatGPT unprecedented access to iPhone features and, in return, locking out competitors from reaching Apple’s massive user base.

Musk claims this arrangement is in violation of antitrust and unfair competition laws and could kill his long-promised plan to build an “everything app” built atop Twitter after he acquired it in 2022.

Apple xAI Exclusive Agreement Violates Antitrust, Unfair Competition Laws: Lawsuit

The complaint says Apple has integrated ChatGPT into iOS as a default chatbot that will power Siri, Apple’s Writing Tools, and other features, giving OpenAI exclusive access to billions of user prompts. X argues this user data is a key input for training and improving the models that power generative AI chatbots, and without access to it, rivals like Grok cannot scale.

The filing puts the onus of proof on OpenAI, saying it controls at least 80 percent of the market for chatbots right now, with a roadmap to take at least 85 percent. “But Apple’s integration cements ChatGPT’s dominant position by making it forever difficult for other companies to catch up or leapfrog ahead,” it says.

“Generative AI chatbots would vigorously compete with one another in a fair market,” the lawsuit states. “Instead, defendants’ anticompetitive conduct has handed a substantial portion of the market to ChatGPT.”

Musk’s filing further argues that Apple is motivated by the “core fear that a successful super app from a rival firm could make iPhones less indispensable, the way WeChat has in China.” It even cites an Apple executive (believed to be Eddy Cue) as saying that AI could “destroy Apple’s smartphone business.” In other words, Musk’s filing paints the exclusive deal as a desperate bid by Apple to protect its iPhone monopoly while also giving OpenAI an insurmountable lead in generative AI.

Apple and OpenAI Comparison to Google Search Deal

In the lawsuit, Musk’s legal team also compared the deal to Apple’s longstanding search engine agreement with Google. The latter, a lawsuit by U.S. regulators last year, was cited as a deliberate entrenchment of Google’s market dominance.

In Musk’s case, the lawsuit says that Apple has turned down repeated attempts by xAI to integrate Grok with iOS. The suit also accuses Apple of even rejecting requests by xAI to feature Grok in the App Store, including during the launch of a new “Imagine” feature.

Beyond that, the lawsuit says that Apple has manipulated the App Store rankings, delayed Grok updates, and employed “thousands of subjective editorial decisions to stifle competition and hurt Grok.”The document describes Apple’s deal with OpenAI as an existential threat. Beyond choking off competition in the AI chatbot market, Apple’s tie-up with OpenAI has far greater potential to make iPhones—and even the iPhone business itself—far less essential to users. Apple customers may end up with fewer chatbot options and less capable services, but will continue paying monopoly prices for Apple devices.

And what’s good for Apple is good for OpenAI, the suit suggests. Grok’s inability to scale without user data also potentially gives OpenAI the leverage to boost subscription prices without fear of user defections. OpenAI, the lawsuit notes, has plans to double its “plus” subscription price over the next four years. “That plan would be unfeasible unless OpenAI has power over marketwide prices,” it alleges.