Musk threatens legal motion against Apple over alleged antitrust violations

Elon Musk on Monday threatened Apple with legal motion over alleged antitrust violations related to rankings of the Grok AI chatbot app, which is owned by his artificial intelligence startup xAI. 

“Apple is behaving in a fashion that makes it not possible for any AI company besides OpenAI to succeed in #1 within the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation. xAI will take immediate legal motion,” Musk wrote in a post on his social media platform X.

Apple didn’t immediately reply to CNBC’s request for comment.

“Why do you refuse to place either X or Grok in your ‘Must Have’ section when X is the #1 news app on the earth and Grok is #5 amongst all apps? Are you playing politics?” Musk said in one other post.

Apple last 12 months tied up with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into its iPhone, iPad, Mac laptop and desktop products. Musk at the moment had said that “If Apple integrates OpenAI on the OS level, then Apple devices will likely be banned at my firms. That’s an unacceptable security violation.”

Prior to his legal threats against Apple, Musk had celebrated Grok surpassing Google because the fifth top free app on the App Store. When contacted by CNBC, xAI didn’t immediately reply to a request for further information on a possible lawsuit.

CNBC confirmed that ChatGPT was ranked No. 1 in the highest free apps section of the American iOS store, and was the one AI chatbot in Apple’s “Must-Have Apps” section. The App Store also featured a link to download OpenAI’s latest flagship AI model, ChatGPT-5 at the highest of its “Apps” section.

OpenAI on Thursday announced GPT-5, its latest and most advanced large-scale AI model, following xAI’s release of its newest chatbot, Grok 4, last month.

Musk has an ongoing feud with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which he co-founded in 2015. The billionaire stepped down from its board in 2018, 4 years after saying that AI was “potentially more dangerous than nukes.”

He’s now suing the Microsoft-backed startup, and its CEO Sam Altman, alleging they abandoned OpenAI’s founding mission to develop artificial intelligence “for the good thing about humanity broadly.”

Robert Keele, who headed the legal department at xAI, announced last week that he had left the corporate to spend more time along with his family. In his announcement, Keele also acknowledged “daylight between our worldviews” with Musk.

In response to Musk’s antitrust threats against Apple, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an X post: “This can be a remarkable claim given what I actually have heard alleged that Elon does to govern X to profit himself and his own firms and harm his competitors and other people he doesn’t like.”

This shouldn’t be the primary time Apple has been challenged on antitrust grounds. In a landmark case, the Department of Justice last 12 months sued the corporate over charges of running an iPhone ecosystem monopoly.

In June, a panel of judges also denied an emergency application from Apple to halt the changes to its App Store resulting from a ruling that the corporate could not charge a commission on payment links inside its apps, nor tell developers how the links should look.

— CNBC’s Kif Leswing and Lora Kolodny contributed to this story.