Musk accused Apple of unfairly promoting ChatGPT on the iPhone

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has criticized Apple's App Store policy. He accused the iPhone maker of giving unjustified advantages to the developer of the artificial OpenAI, which Musk himself once stood at the origins of, and threatened antitrust proceedings. Musk owns xAI, an AI startup that competes with OpenAI.

The founder of Tesla and xAI Holdings (which combines the Grok chatbot team and the X social network) said that Apple is making it impossible for anyone but OpenAI to get to the top of the App Store charts, a key platform for global developer promotion. In a pinned post on his X account, Musk wondered if Apple was "playing politics" by depriving X and Grok of promotion, in his opinion. The billionaire vowed to "take immediate legal action" for what he believes is a violation of antitrust laws.

This is the most serious public conflict Musk has been involved in since his confrontation with US President Donald Trump in June, when the two exchanged sharp invectives toward each other on their own social media accounts, Bloomberg notes.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, with whom Musk has long feuded, responded to allegations of misconduct by turning the conversation to how Musk himself runs social network X. "From what I hear, Elon allegedly manipulates X to benefit himself and his companies and to hurt his competitors and people he doesn't like," Altman wrote.

Apple and OpenAI, whose chatbot ChatGPT is the most downloaded free iPhone app in the US (Grok is in fifth place), have a partnership to integrate AI into the latest iPhone models. Apple has been aggressively integrating OpenAI technologies into its products in recent months, from its Siri voice assistant to its Writing Tools text editing tools, with a focus on privacy and convenience.

OpenAI's new AI model, GPT-5, released last week, will become part of Apple Intelligence with the release of the new iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and macOS Tahoe 26 operating systems in September, Apple told the 9to5Mac website. There will likely be several ways for iPhone and Mac users to access GPT-5. The most obvious one is to ask Siri a difficult question that the voice assistant can't handle on its own, Techradar writes. The publication suggests that GPT-5 may also be integrated into Apple's Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence feature, which uses the iPhone's camera to identify objects in the user's field of view.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor