Elon Musk has threatened to take legal action against Apple over what he alleges is unfair treatment of his Grok AI chatbot app on the App Store.
On his X (Twitter) platform, Musk accused Apple of “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.” In another post, Musk alleged that Apple is “refusing” to put either X or Grok in its “Must Have” section despite them being the “number one news app in the world” and “number 5 among all apps,” respectively.
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.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2025
He questioned whether Apple is “playing politics” and said xAI, his AI startup that owns Grok, will take “immediate” legal action over this alleged antitrust violation.
Notably, Musk was once again fact-checked by his own platform regarding all of these claims. It noted that the AI chatbot DeepSeek reached number one on the App Store in January 2025, followed by Perplexity topping India’s App Store in July. Both of these come a year after Apple announced its big partnership with OpenAI.
On top of this, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has weighed in on the matter with criticism of Musk himself. “This is a remarkable claim given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn’t like,” Altman posted on X.
It remains to be seen what, if anything, will come out of all this, but Musk making baseless claims wouldn’t exactly be anything new.
Via: CNBC
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