Elon Musk accuses App Store of favouring OpenAI
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Mr Elon Musk said “xAI will take immediate legal action”.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Follow topic:
SAN FRANCISCO - Mr Elon Musk has taken his feud against OpenAI to the App Store, accusing Apple of favouring ChatGPT in the digital shop and vowing legal action.
“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,” Mr Musk said in a post on his social network X on Aug 11, without providing evidence to back his claim.
“xAI will take immediate legal action,” he added, referencing his own artificial intelligence company.
X users responded by pointing out that DeepSeek AI out of China hit the top spot in the App Store early in 2025, and Perplexity AI recently ranked No. 1 in the App Store in India.
DeepSeek and Perplexity compete with OpenAI and Mr Musk’s start-up xAI.
Both OpenAI and xAI released new versions of their AI assistants, ChatGPT and Grok, in the past week.
App Store rankings on Aug 12 listed ChatGPT as the top free iPhone app with Grok in fifth place.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Factors going into App Store rankings include user engagement, reviews, and the number of downloads.
OpenAI and Apple in June 2024 announced an alliance to enhance iPhones and other devices with ChatGPT features.
ChatGPT-5 rolled out free to the nearly 700 million people who use it weekly, OpenAI said in a briefing with journalists last week.
Tech industry rivals Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and xAI have been pouring billions of dollars into artificial intelligence since the blockbuster launch of the first version of ChatGPT in late 2022.
Chinese start-up DeepSeek shook up the AI sector
OpenAI in April filed counterclaims against multi-billionaire Musk, accusing its former co-founder of waging a “relentless campaign” to damage the organisation after it achieved success without him.
In legal documents filed at the time in northern California federal court, OpenAI alleged Mr Musk became hostile towards the company after abandoning it years before its breakthrough achievements with ChatGPT.
The lawsuit was another round in a bitter feud between the generative AI (genAI) start-up and the world’s richest man, who sued OpenAI in 2024, accusing the company of betraying its founding mission.
In its countersuit, the company alleged Mr Musk “made it his project to take down OpenAI, and to build a direct competitor that would seize the technological lead – not for humanity but for Elon Musk”.
Mr Musk founded his own genAI startup, xAI, in 2023 to compete with OpenAI and the other major AI players. AFP
