Apple & OpenAI must face baseless xAI lawsuit

Elon Musk wasn’t happy with how xAI was performing in Apple’s App Store compared to ChatGPT, so he filed a lawsuit, which Apple and OpenAI must now face after failing to get it dismissed.

There are a lot of odd details surrounding a case that pits Elon Musk and former business partner Sam Altman against each other — with Apple trapped in the middle. Musk’s xAI developed Grok to compete with ChatGPT, but it has fallen short with a highly biased bot programmed to promote extremism in place of facts.

While Grok is technically impressive on its own, its bias has made it a limited competitor for those seeking out that kind of biased information. According to a report from Bloomberg, Apple and OpenAI must face a lawsuit claiming that the failure of Grok’s popularity is due to anti-competitive behavior.

Apple and OpenAI have already denied the allegations. OpenAI accused Musk of waging “lawfare” against Altman. Apple says it doesn’t have exclusivity agreements preventing other companies from running in a similar manner to ChatGPT on iOS.

While OpenAI is the only current partnership, Apple has made it clear on several occasions that it intends to bring in other third-party AI models. Ironically, the lawsuit will likely prevent Grok from ever being offered in such a manner.

The lawsuit alleges that Apple and OpenAI are deliberately depriving consumers of choice through their partnership. However, the origins of the lawsuit aren’t quite so cut and dry.

How we got here

Before the lawsuit was filed, the disagreement Musk had with Apple and OpenAI was far more conspiratorial. He believed that Apple was deliberately keeping Grok from reaching number one on the App Store, and in a separate post, X.

At the time, Grok was number 6 while X was 38 in the top free charts. Today, Grok is 12 and X is 29.

These apps stay within that general vicinity due to the contraction of X as a platform.

The tone of Musk’s accusations shifted quickly to focus on xAI and Grok, likely due to lawyers suggesting a reasonable path for a lawsuit. While he’d never be able to prove Apple was changing the App Store algorithm, he can make the claim that Apple and OpenAI’s partnership may be limiting competition.

However, even that lawsuit is frivolous at best given that other AI companies have shot to the top of Apple’s free charts multiple times. ChatGPT doesn’t stay in number one permanently either, but its overwhelming popularity does keep it there.

Grok and, by extension, X have struggled with popularity in recent months. Repeated scandals rock Musk’s user base on a regular basis, whether it’s Grok declaring itself “Mecha Hitler” or X restoring a controversial account, the lack of wider interest is owed to their target niche.

Grok’s struggle for relevance has also been punctuated by a pivot to adult content, a move echoed recently by ChatGPT. If Grok is the leader of anything in AI, it is as an indicator of how close the industry is to implosion.

Apple’s lawyers were likely hoping to avoid a full-scale lawsuit, but Musk chose Texas for his business operations for a reason. The judge didn’t share why he made his decision, but all companies involved must now submit filings to argue their individual cases.