Tech billionaire Elon Musk accused Apple of favoring OpenAI in its App Store rankings and recommendations, calling it “clear anti-competitive behavior.” Musk, in a post on social platform X on Monday, stated that xAI would take legal action against this.
Hours earlier, Musk publicly questioned Apple, saying “X is the top news App globally, and Grok is ranked fifth among all Apps,” yet Apple still “refuses to feature X or Grok in your ‘Must Have Apps’ section.”
“Are you playing politics here? What’s going on? Curious minds want to know,” Musk wrote on X.
Last month, xAI launched the Grok 4 model, claiming significant performance improvement over main competitors and also released image and video generation tool Grok Imagine, along with a “companion” chatbot feature.
According to App Figures data, the Grok app rose from around 60th place to 29th in the overall App Store rankings last week. After being made available for free to global users this week, Grok surpassed Google to reach fifth place in the free App chart, ranking second in the “Productivity” category.
While Grok’s climb in the rankings was substantial, it still falls short of ChatGPT’s dominance, which has consistently been at the top of Apple’s rankings for most of the past year and is the only AI chatbot featured in the “Must Have Apps” section.
Apple has repeatedly recommended ChatGPT in App Store editorial content over the past year, establishing a partnership with OpenAI and integrating ChatGPT into Siri and writing tool functions in the new Apple Intelligence service.
This has sparked Musk’s discontent, leading him to announce his intention to sue over these actions.
“Apple’s behavior prevents any AI company other than OpenAI from ranking first in the App Store, which is a clear antitrust violation,” Musk wrote, adding that xAI would take legal action immediately.
Musk is a co-founder of OpenAI, but parted ways with the organization early on. Recently, he also filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in an attempt to prevent the company from transitioning to a for-profit model, a case that is still pending.
Last year, when Apple announced its collaboration with OpenAI, Musk warned that “if Apple integrates OpenAI at the operating system level, my company will ban the use of Apple devices. This is an unacceptable security vulnerability.”
xAI and OpenAI are now direct competitors in the generative AI market.
Last Thursday, OpenAI also introduced its latest and most advanced large language model, GPT-5. The model is believed to outperform the previous GPT-4o in logical reasoning, data integration, and long-form text generation, suitable for technical discussions, research analysis, and other professional contexts.
The simultaneous product updates from both companies further escalate the competitive atmosphere. It remains unclear what action Musk will ultimately take, as he has threatened legal action before without necessarily following through.
However, based on past experiences, he is likely to continue posting more content with the support of his followers, and as time progresses, his actions may become clearer.