Apple seeks dismissal of xAI antitrust suit over OpenAI ChatGPT

Apple asked a federal judge on Tuesday to dismiss a lawsuit from Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI and its parent X Corp., arguing that claims the iPhone maker unlawfully favored OpenAI are speculative and legally insufficient. The suit, filed in August in the U.S. District Court in Fort Worth, Texas, seeks billions in damages and injunctive relief after xAI alleged that Apple’s integration of OpenAI’s ChatGPT into system-level features unfairly marginalized competing chatbots including xAI’s Grok.

In court filings, Apple said the agreement with OpenAI is nonexclusive and publicly known, and that the company intends to partner with multiple generative AI providers. Apple’s lawyers wrote that X Corp.’s theory would require Apple to form identical partnerships with every AI chatbot regardless of technical feasibility, quality, privacy or commercial terms, and they urged the judge to reject what they called a chain of speculation. “Antitrust laws do not require that,” the filing said.

xAI’s complaint centers on a June 2024 agreement that made ChatGPT available as a fallback for Siri and as part of Apple Intelligence across iPhone, iPad and Mac devices. xAI contends that the integration...