Musk's suit says Apple and OpenAI collude to favor ChatGPT on iPhone

Elon Musk’s companies filed a 61-page antitrust complaint on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Fort Worth Division, accusing Apple and OpenAI of colluding to block competition in artificial intelligence by privileging OpenAI’s ChatGPT on iPhones. The suit, brought by xAI and X Corp., seeks a permanent injunction, billions of dollars in damages and a jury trial, and alleges the partnership announced last year effectively locks rivals out of the smartphone and generative AI markets.

The complaint contends that Apple, worried that AI-driven “super apps” could undermine the iPhone, struck an exclusive arrangement with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into iOS. That integration, xAI and X say, gives OpenAI access to billions of user prompts from hundreds of millions of iPhone users and creates an incentive for Apple to elevate ChatGPT in App Store rankings while deprioritizing competitors such as xAI’s Grok. The filing calls the arrangement “a tale of two monopolists joining forces to ensure their continued dominance,” and asserts consumers and rival developers are harmed because they cannot readily switch away from the iPhone to use alternative...