- calendar_today August 29, 2025
Musk’s latest war on Apple, and now on OpenAI as well, is being fought in the courtroom this week. On Monday, his companies filed a lawsuit against the two tech giants, accusing them of teaming up to entrench monopolies in the rapidly expanding AI chatbot market. The complaint comes just weeks after Musk was publicly lambasting Apple over what he characterized as the iPhone maker’s one-sided promotion of OpenAI’s ChatGPT over Musk’s own chatbot Grok.
Filed on behalf of Musk’s X and xAI companies, the complaint goes beyond grumblings about App Store rankings to allege that Apple and OpenAI have cut an exclusive deal that not only gives ChatGPT special access to iPhone features but also prevents competitors from reaching Apple’s user base. That, Musk says, is a violation of antitrust and unfair competition laws, and it could thwart his much-vaunted ambition of building an “everything app” from the ashes of Twitter, which he bought in 2022.
Per the complaint, Apple has integrated ChatGPT into iOS, making it the default chatbot in Siri, Apple’s Writing Tools, and other services. The arrangement grants OpenAI exclusive access to trillions of user prompts and other data, which X argues is crucial to training and improving chatbot models. Musk is therefore saying rivals like Grok will be left with no access to training data, and the App Store will prevent them from reaching Apple’s 2 billion users in any case. Musk says OpenAI already controls 80 percent of the chatbot market share; with Apple’s integrations, the lawsuit says, OpenAI could hold a permanent chokehold on the market.
Generative AI chatbots “would vigorously compete with one another in a fair market,” the lawsuit states. “Instead, defendants’ anticompetitive conduct has handed a substantial portion of the market to ChatGPT.”
X argues Apple is driven by a desire to avoid having a rival super app one day make iPhones less essential, just as the WeChat app in China has become a standalone replacement for many different smartphone features and apps. It even cites an Apple executive, Eddy Cue, reportedly worrying that advances in AI could “destroy Apple’s smartphone business.” By that logic, Musk’s filing paints the deal as a knee-jerk effort to hold on to the iPhone monopoly, and a bid to help OpenAI build an insurmountable advantage in generative AI.
Exclusive Access Gives OpenAI Growing Market Power
The complaint draws comparisons to Apple’s longstanding search engine deal with Google, which U.S. regulators have long argued cemented Google’s search monopoly. Musk says Apple rebuffed repeated requests to integrate Grok with iOS, and reportedly also rebuffed requests to feature Grok in the App Store, including in the App Store’s own “Imagine” feature when it launched. Beyond that, the filing claims Apple manipulated App Store rankings and stymied Grok updates to smother competition.
Musk argues that it’s not just about Grok’s market share, but the future of AI-driven platforms as a whole. The lawsuit notes that Siri processed 1.5 billion user requests a day worldwide in 2024, dwarfing the total number of prompts for all generative AI chatbots in that year. But if all those prompts are exclusively going to OpenAI, X argues, Apple is essentially controlling up to 55 percent of all potential chatbot user interactions in the world, through OpenAI alone.
The filing also suggests that it has bad consequences for consumers, who could end up with fewer options and less capable chatbots, while having to pay monopoly prices for Apple phones. Meanwhile, OpenAI could use its dominant position to raise subscription fees and other costs for AI services, which have plans to double its “plus” subscription price over the next four years. “That plan would be unfeasible unless OpenAI has power over marketwide prices,” the lawsuit alleges.
Musk also warns of the potential impact on future investment in the field. If Apple keeps using its considerable power to “press its thumb firmly on the scale in ChatGPT’s favor,” X argues, then it makes little sense for investors to fund alternative companies when they have little chance of ever being allowed to fairly compete. They may be “starved of the resources necessary to grow,” the lawsuit states, leading to the loss of talent to Big Tech companies with the ability to scoop up star developers from struggling startups.
The suit also questions the financial logic of the Apple-OpenAI deal. According to X, OpenAI is giving ChatGPT to Apple for free and has essentially had to pay the company for the privilege of an exclusive partnership. Meanwhile, Apple expects no direct revenue or profits in the near term from the integration, and the suit notes its own executives have even said so. The filing suggests Apple and OpenAI do not value the exclusivity for its potential to bring in immediate money, but rather because it broadly prevents rival chatbots from reaching a large share of consumers, thereby entrenching both companies’ control over the market.
