Elon Musk on Monday threatened legal action against Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), accusing it of antitrust violations over the App Store’s rankings of Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot from his startup xAI.
“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 social media platform X.
“Why do you refuse to put either X or Grok in your ‘Must Have’ section when X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps? Are you playing politics?” Musk said in a separate post.
Before threatening Apple with legal action, Musk had celebrated Grok’s rise to the fifth spot among the top free apps on the App Store, surpassing Google. The milestone came just weeks after xAI launched its latest chatbot, Grok 4.
The rivalry in the AI space intensified last week when OpenAI unveiled GPT-5, its most advanced large-scale AI model to date. The release followed Grok 4’s debut last month, underscoring the escalating competition between Musk’s xAI and the Microsoft-backed OpenAI, which Apple has integrated into its devices.
Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) last year partnered with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into its devices. Musk at that time had said that “If Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned at my companies. That is an unacceptable security violation.”
Musk’s feud with OpenAI dates back to his 2018 departure from its board; he is currently suing the Microsoft-backed (NASDAQ:MSFT) startup and CEO Sam Altman for straying from its founding mission.
Apple (AAPL), meanwhile, is already facing U.S. antitrust scrutiny over its App Store practices, including limits on payment links inside apps. In a landmark case last year, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the tech fir, alleging it maintained a monopoly over the iPhone ecosystem.