A person holding a smartphone showing Grok's iOS store page with Apple logo visible in the background.
Cheng Xin | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Elon Musk threatens Monday apple Through legal action against alleged antitrust violations, the behavior is related to the ranking of the Grok AI Chatbot app, owned by his artificial intelligence startup XAI.
“Apple's actions make it impossible for any AI company to get #1 in the App Store, a clear antitrust violation. XAI will take legal action immediately,” Musk wrote in an article on his social media platform X.
Apple did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.
“Why do you think X is the number one news app in the world and Grok is the number five of all apps? Musk said in another article.
Apple bundled with Openai last year to integrate Chatgpt into its iPhone, iPad, Mac laptop and desktop products. “If Apple integrated OpenAI at the operating system level, then my company would ban Apple devices. This is an unacceptable security violation,” Musk said at the time.
Before his legal threat to Apple, Musk celebrates Grok surpassing Google to become the fifth top free app on the App Store. When contacted via CNBC, XAI did not immediately respond to requests for more information about potential litigation.
CNBC confirmed Chatgpt ranks number one in the top free apps section of the US iOS store and is the only AI chatbot in Apple's “must-have apps” section. The App Store also provides a link to download Openai’s new flagship AI model, Chatgpt-5 at the top of its “Apps” section.
Openai announced the GPT-5 on Thursday, its latest, state-of-the-art large-scale AI model after Xai released its latest chatbot, Grok 4 last month.
Musk has had an ongoing dispute with Chatgpt Maker Openai, who co-founded the company in 2015. The billionaire resigned in 2018 and in 2018, and four years later, he said AI “may be more dangerous than Nukes.”
He is now suing the Microsoft-backed startup and its CEO Sam Altman, accusing them of abandoning Openai’s founding mission to develop artificial intelligence “for the widespread interests of humanity.”
Robert Keele, who is in charge of XAI's legal department, announced last week that he had left the company to be with his family. In the announcement, Kiel also acknowledged Musk's “daylight between our worldviews.”
“In response to Musk's antitrust threat to Apple,” Openai CEO Sam Altman said in an X post: “It's an extraordinary claim, given the claims I've heard that Elon tried hard to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own company and hurt competitors and people he doesn't like. ”
This is not the first time Apple is challenging for antitrust. In a landmark case, the Justice Department sued the company last year for running a monopoly of the iPhone ecosystem.
In June, a group of judges also denied Apple's emergency application to block changes to its app store because the company could no longer charge commissions for payment links within its app, and did not tell developers what the link looks like.
– Kif Leswing and Lora Kolodny of CNBC contributed to this story.