Competition at the top of the charts: Apple wants xAI's lawsuit dismissed
Elon Musk believes that Apple favours other AI companies, including OpenAI. Apple's lawyers reject this
X logo on a smartphone.
(Image: sdx15/Shutterstock.com)
Apple is defending itself against a lawsuit filed by the Elon Musk companies X and xAI, which accuse the iPhone manufacturer of favoring other AI applications over Grok in the App Store. The lawsuit, which accuses Apple of violating competition law, among other things, is based on “speculation upon speculation,” according to a petition filed by the company with the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas. Musk believes that Apple favors competitors of its AI app Grok in the App Store—and in particular OpenAI with ChatGPT. X and xAI have therefore sued OpenAI as well as Apple (X Corp. v. Apple Inc., 25-cv-00914).
Apple: Talking to everyone
X had argued, among other things, that Apple should not enter into a partnership with OpenAI “without simultaneously entering into a partnership with every other generative AI chatbot.” – “regardless of quality, privacy or security considerations, technical feasibility, stage of development, or economic conditions.” Apple's lawyers argue that US competition law “obviously does not” require this.
Apple is therefore requesting that the lawsuit be dismissed. X and xAI are seeking billions of dollars in damages for alleged favoritism. Together with OpenAI, innovations in the AI industry have been stifled and customers have been deprived of choice. Insiders point out, among other things, that there have been talks between Apple and Google about Gemini for some time. In fact, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai had already publicly confirmed this.
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Dispute over the app store charts
The legal dispute between Apple and OpenAI as well as X and xAI began after Elon Musk accused Apple of manipulating the app store charts. He claimed that only ChatGPT could become number one and not a competitor. Interestingly, however, Google's own Gemini app later succeeded in knocking ChatGPT off the throne due to the popular Nano Banana image model.
In an X post, Musk also criticized the fact that neither Grok nor X appear in the App Store's “must have” recommendations, even though both apps have high chart rankings and therefore many downloads on iPhones. “Are you playing political games? What's going on?” he wrote. The complaint states, among other things, that the partnership between OpenAI and Apple is illegal. No other AI app can integrate so deeply into iOS. Users already have a chatbot that they can address via Siri and are therefore less interested in downloading other AI apps.
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