Musk Drops Apple From Texas AI Antitrust Case, Keeps OpenAI Fight Alive
Apple exits the case as Musk’s legal battle with OpenAI continues
AUSTIN, Texas — Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI and social media enterprise X Corp. have voluntarily moved to dismiss Apple Inc. from a federal antitrust lawsuit in Texas, narrowing a legal battle that accused tech giants of conspiring to dominate the generative artificial intelligence market.
According to a court filing submitted in federal court in Texas, claims against Apple have been formally resolved and dropped. The filing did not disclose the underlying reasons for the dismissal or reveal whether the resolution was reached through an out-of-court settlement agreement. Representatives for Apple and Musk’s entities did not immediately provide additional details regarding the terms of the dismissal.
X Corp. and xAI intend to continue pursuing their antitrust claims against co-defendant OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. The complaint alleged that Apple’s exclusive partnership with OpenAI violated U.S. antitrust laws by foreclosing market competition and attempting to prevent rival AI developers—including xAI—from reaching consumers.
Apple announced its partnership with OpenAI in June 2024 during its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Under the arrangement, OpenAI’s ChatGPT model—specifically GPT-4o—was integrated into Apple Intelligence across iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia. Siri and system writing tools could access ChatGPT for complex queries with explicit user permission.
In the filing, X Corp. and xAI asserted that Apple and OpenAI operated in tandem to maintain monopolistic control over the AI landscape. The complaint specifically alleged that Apple suppressed the distribution and visibility of rival applications on its iOS App Store, claiming that “if not for its exclusive deal with OpenAI, Apple would have no reason to refrain from more prominently featuring the X app and the Grok app in its App Store.”
Third-party market data showed that several rival AI software applications successfully reached top rankings on Apple’s App Store following the rollout of the Apple-OpenAI deal. Competing AI tools, including Perplexity AI and China-based AI startup DeepSeek, achieved top placement on the iOS free app charts during the same timeframe. Apple stated in June 2024 that it intended to add support for additional third-party AI models, including Google’s Gemini, in future software updates.
The decision to maintain claims against OpenAI prolongs a long-standing, multi-front legal fight between Musk and the AI research firm. Musk co-founded OpenAI in December 2015 alongside current chief executive Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and several researchers as a non-profit laboratory dedicated to developing safe artificial general intelligence.
Musk departed OpenAI’s board of directors in 2018, citing potential future conflicts of interest with Tesla Inc.’s development of autonomous driving software. In July 2023, Musk launched xAI to build alternative AI systems, later embedding its flagship large language model, Grok, into the X platform for paying subscribers.
Musk has separately sued OpenAI and Altman in state and federal courts in California, alleging breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty related to OpenAI’s transition to a commercial structure and its multi-billion-dollar investment partnership with Microsoft Corp.
The dismissal of Apple from the Texas lawsuit comes as xAI faces expanding legal and regulatory challenges over the output and safety controls of its Grok chatbot. Law enforcement officials and state regulatory authorities in California are conducting an active investigation into xAI following reports that Grok’s image-generation features were utilized to produce child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and non-consensual sexually explicit deepfake imagery targeting women and girls online.
