Elon Musk took legal action against Apple and OpenAI on Monday, alleging that the two companies have colluded to lock in monopolies in the rapidly expanding AI chatbot market. The lawsuit follows weeks of complaints from Musk, who lambasted Apple on Sunday for “always” featuring OpenAI’s ChatGPT in App Store recommendations, but never putting his own chatbot, Grok, on the “Must Have” list.

Filed on behalf of Musk’s companies X and xAI, the lawsuit goes much further than gripes about App Store rankings. It claims Apple and OpenAI have entered into an exclusive deal that not only gives ChatGPT previously unavailable access to iPhone features but also locks out competitors from reaching Apple’s massive user base. The arrangement, Musk says, violates antitrust and unfair competition laws and threatens to kill the billionaire’s long-promised goal of building an “everything app” atop Twitter, which he bought in 2022.

According to the complaint, Apple gave ChatGPT the default status across Siri, its Writing Tools, and other iPhone features. Apple also provided OpenAI with exclusive access to the billions of user prompts it would receive through those features. As training conversational models, X argues, such data is crucial to scale and improve chatbots. The deal’s terms would have permanently sidelined Grok, Musk’s filing states, and OpenAI already controls at least 80 percent of the chatbot market, according to the complaint.

“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.”

Apple is reportedly concerned about Grok and other super apps because they have the potential to make iPhones less critical to consumers, just as the all-in-one WeChat app has in China. The company “doesn’t want competition, Apple executive Eddy Cue reportedly said, “because if this works, it’s going to destroy Apple’s smartphone business.” The deal amounts to a move by both companies to preserve their dominance, Musk’s filing argues, while helping OpenAI build an insurmountable lead in generative AI.

Exclusive, Growing Market Power

In the complaint, Musk’s lawyers draw comparisons to Apple’s long-running search engine deal with Google, which has been repeatedly challenged by U.S. regulators for entrenching the search giant’s monopoly. Musk alleges Apple rejected repeated requests to allow Grok to integrate with iOS and also rejected a request to put Grok in the App Store last month when it was released. Apple’s new “Imagine” feature that will launch ChatGPT inside some first-party iPhone apps also omitted Grok, according to the lawsuit, even after Apple promised a deal was in the works. The filing also claims that Apple manipulated App Store rankings and held up Grok updates to stifle competition.

Much more than Grok’s ability to compete is at stake, Musk says, but the very future of AI-driven platforms. In that light, the filing points out that Siri processed 1.5 billion requests per day worldwide in 2024, according to research firm Flurry Analytics. The total number of prompts made to all chatbot services that year was less than a quarter of that volume, the lawsuit notes. If Apple customers are sending their queries to OpenAI and OpenAI alone, X argues that the company could control up to 55 percent of all potential chatbot interactions in the real world.

The filing warns that the consequences of this could be significant for consumers and competition. Apple customers, Musk’s complaint suggests, could be left with fewer choices and less capable chatbots, paying monopoly prices for both their phones and subscriptions. The deal with Apple, it also suggests, would allow OpenAI to raise prices across its suite of generative AI apps, including a “plus” subscription that will double in price over the next four years, according to a plan the company filed with the SEC. “That plan would be unfeasible unless OpenAI has power over marketwide prices,” the lawsuit alleges.

Musk’s filing also raises the prospect of chilling effects on investment and innovation. If the market is clear now and Apple continues to “press its thumb firmly on the scale” in OpenAI’s favor, investors may not see a reason to fund rivals, which in turn deprives them of the resources needed to scale, X argues. The startup also highlights how Big Tech firms could take a disproportionate share of AI talent by snapping up developers from starved-for-resources startups.

The filing also questions why Apple and OpenAI would enter a deal like this if it did not increase their own market power. According to X, OpenAI gave ChatGPT to Apple for free and paid for the partnership itself, while Apple expects “minimal to no profit from its own deal with OpenAI for the near-term.” The two companies did not include specific provisions on the number of chatbots in the deal, suggesting both found Apple’s exclusive integration more important than collecting any direct revenue, the filing says.

“The true motive was Apple and OpenAI’s shared goal of blocking competition,” the complaint states. “By making the deal exclusive, Apple sacrificed the profits it would have earned by integrating multiple chatbots.”