Elon Musk Slams Apple for ‘Favouring’ OpenAI Over xAI, Warns of Legal Action

New Delhi (The Uttam Hindu): Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk on Tuesday threatened legal action against tech giant Apple, alleging that the company was unfairly prioritising OpenAI applications in its App Store. He alleged that this favouritism prevented Musk's own AI startup, XAI, from securing the number one spot on the App Store.
"Apple is behaving in a way that makes it impossible for any AI company other than OpenAI to achieve the number one position in the App Store, which is a clear antitrust violation. XAI will take legal action immediately," Musk wrote on social media platform X. "Unfortunately, what choice do we have left? Apple has put not just its thumb on the scale, but its entire body," he said in another post. The allegation comes as competition between XAI's large language model, Grok, and OpenAI's ChatGPT intensifies. XAI launched Grok 4 last month and claimed performance improvements over competitors.
The AI firm has since added features such as Grok Imagine for image and video generation and a personalized companion chatbot. Grok has moved up from 60th place to second in Apple's productivity category. The free tier allows only a limited number of queries per day, after which it requires a subscription.
ChatGPT has consistently ranked first or second in Apple's overall charts for the past year. Musk alleged that Apple's support for ChatGPT is not driven by natural popularity. Apple has highlighted ChatGPT in editorial content on the App Store and incorporated OpenAI's technology into its own Apple Intelligence rollout, integrating it directly into Siri and writing tools.
Last week, at the launch of GPT‑5, ChatGPT maker OpenAI announced big bonus payouts for about 1,000 employees, roughly one-third of its full-time staff.