“There is no telling how long this exclusive arrangement will last,” X said, warning the court that OpenAI’s rivals “suffer harm every moment they are illegally denied access to these prompts.”
X suggests that Apple has no valid pro-competitive reason to give ChatGPT such exclusivity and seemed stung that Apple allegedly rejected xAI’s request to integrate Grok with iOS.
Supposedly, Apple has also rejected “numerous requests by xAI for the Grok app to be featured in the App Store,” including when the app launched and more recently when X debuted Grok’s new “Imagine” feature.
In addition to “manipulating App Store rankings,” Musk’s lawsuit accused Apple of “delaying approval for updates to xAI’s Grok app” as another way to reduce competition.
If not for all of this anticompetitive behavior, Grok and other rival chatbots would be “more widely used,” X alleged, and that would generate more revenue and accelerate chatbot innovation across the board. But Apple likely doesn’t want that to happen, because it fears that a superior Grok will fuel X super apps that will make it easier to switch to a cheaper smartphone—and perhaps one day make iPhones obsolete.
Musk fears deal could doom X “everything app”
X’s lawsuit alleges that shady finances of the OpenAI/Apple deal suggest it was designed to block AI innovation.
“OpenAI has provided ChatGPT to Apple for free and is functionally paying for the arrangement itself,” X’s complaint said, while noting that Apple allegedly doesn’t expect to receive a profit from the deal any time soon.
X noted a report indicating that Apple “pushing OpenAI’s brand and technology to hundreds of millions of its devices is of equal or greater value than monetary payments.” In short, X claimed that “OpenAI is willing to sacrifice short-term profits in exchange for such access” as a means of maintaining dominance. And Apple similarly has no expectations for short-term gains, only planning to take an “eventual cut” of “OpenAI’s monetization of ChatGPT prompts through its iPhones and other devices,” X alleged.