Elon Musk alleges Apple bias towards OpenAI, threatens lawsuit over App Store rankings

The growing rivalry in the artificial intelligence space has now entered Apple’s walled gardens as xAI CEO Elon Musk on Monday accused the iPhone maker of favouring his fiercest rival OpenAI. Musk stated that Apple’s current methodology does not any app except OpenAI’s ChatGPT to reach the number 1 rank spot on the App Store which he says is an antitrust violation.

“Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation. xAI will take immediate legal action.” Musk wrote in a post on X.

“Unfortunately, what choice do we have? Apple didn’t just put their thumb on the scale, they put their whole body!” he added

Musk also reacted in affirmation to a reply that claimed that Apple was biased given that the company uses ChatGPT to power features in iOS.

Notably, Apple uses ChatGPT to anwer the more complex queries that its Siri voice assistant cannot answer. The AI chatbot also powers Apple’s writing tools and visual intelligence feature announced at WWDC last year.

Elon Musk and OpenAI rivalry:

Musk has had a long and complex relationship with OpenAI spanning over a decade from being one of the co-founders of the company to becoming one of its fiercest rivals. The xAI owner has also sued OpenAI and its biggest backer Microsoft for breach of contract. Musk alleges that OpenAI was built to develop AGI for the ‘benefit of humanity’ but that project has been transformed into a for profit entity.

Just last week after OpenAI’s GPT-5 launch, Musk had warned Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about OpenAI stating that the ChatGPT maker would ‘eat Microsoft alive’.

Meanwhile, Musk has since been focusing on promoting his Grok AI chatbot even more rigorously by making its photo and video generator Imagine feature free along with access to the new Grok 4 models.