After weeks of public criticism over Apple’s exclusive promotion of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Elon Musk on Monday filed a lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI, accusing the companies of colluding to protect their monopolies in a rapidly growing market for AI chatbots.

Filed on behalf of Musk’s companies X and xAI, the complaint against Apple and OpenAI centers on their recent deal to integrate ChatGPT into iOS, but also alleges that Apple has worked to promote ChatGPT across App Store rankings and other features while limiting opportunities for potential rivals. The lawsuit further argues the deal amounts to an exclusive agreement between the companies, preventing other chatbot models from getting access to iPhone features and, by extension, Apple’s “billions of users.”

The filing names Apple and OpenAI as defendants and accuses them of “anticompetitive conduct” that violates antitrust and unfair competition laws. It says Apple has manipulated App Store rankings to “burden or delay the deployment” of products from the defendants’ competitors while offering ChatGPT “exclusive access” to iPhone features. The lawsuit also demands “damages in the billions of dollars,” a permanent injunction against Apple’s deal with OpenAI, and a jury trial.

An OpenAI spokesperson told Ars Technica that the lawsuit is just the latest example of “harassment and interference from Elon Musk.” An Apple spokesperson declined to comment.

AI chatbots are becoming increasingly powerful and popular, with early models already reaching billions of users worldwide. Grok was announced less than four months ago, and Apple and OpenAI made the news of their deal public just last week.

Musk tweeted about the chatbot shortly after its launch in February, and X’s filing alleges Apple and OpenAI have retaliated against the company by de-ranking its app in the App Store and blocking integration opportunities.

Chatbots and Apple’s iPhone Dominance

The lawsuit goes well beyond those grievances, however, arguing Apple and OpenAI have joined forces to prevent potential rivals from ever catching up or getting any significant share of their user bases. According to X’s estimates, the two companies combined control at least 80 percent of the current chatbot market.

The suit also targets the integration of ChatGPT into iOS, which Apple announced last week. Apple has integrated the tool into Siri, its “Writing Tools”, and other features. The deal also allows OpenAI to “rely on generative AI to build a more personalized and predictive computing experience,” as part of an overall rebranding of Apple’s privacy-focused “neural engine” under the name “Apple Intelligence.”

The filing states that Apple will “act as a data middleman for OpenAI” and give the AI startup access to “massive quantities of user prompts” to train its own products, even citing a current Apple ad promising “Apple Intelligence can anticipate what you want to say even before you say it.” As for other companies, X argues that “chatbot services use on-device user prompts to train and improve their models,” and inaccessibility to those user prompts in iOS would severely handicap their ability to scale their services.

“With Apple’s data exclusivity agreement with OpenAI, the Apple ecosystem, in which defendants’ chatbot services will be used billions of times a day, is effectively closed to X and other chatbot services,” the lawsuit states. “And even in the unlikely event that those chatbot services find a way to reach Apple users, they have no way to obtain the user prompts needed to scale.”

In other words, the filing charges that Apple and OpenAI’s integration deal for ChatGPT has the potential to foreclose chatbot markets to all other potential competitors. But X’s complaint doesn’t end there. The filing also delves into Apple’s App Store rankings, its handling of Grok updates, and its deal with Google for search engine primacy. According to the lawsuit, Apple’s arrangement with Google has been similarly controversial, with regulators saying it entrenched Google’s search engine monopoly.

OpenAI has integrated ChatGPT deeply into iOS, much as Google has with its search engine, and with that access could cement OpenAI’s place atop the generative AI market.

Apple’s New “Imagine” Feature and Market Dynamics

The Apple deal, announced last week, will roll out new generative AI tools in iOS 18, called the “Imagine” features. Apple, too, is working on generative AI tools of its own, making these relationships all the more important to the future landscape of generative AI tools.

A key portion of Apple’s new deal with OpenAI was keeping it exclusive to the iPhone maker, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeting that “Apple is the only platform company that will have preferential access to OpenAI technology.” He added that Apple would “exclusively benefit from” OpenAI’s tools.

Apple’s arrangement gives OpenAI access to hundreds of millions of iPhone users and possibly billions of user prompts for training its AI, while Apple gets early access to OpenAI’s chatbot as well as access to future tools in the same domain.

Musk, for his part, has also been active in the AI space for some time. He is attempting to use Grok as part of a much larger “everything app” similar to China’s WeChat, similar to the loose and ill-defined plans for X he first made for Twitter after he purchased the platform in 2022. Musk has said in the past that his focus for X is to build such an “everything app,” though he has backed away from that description recently.

The future of AI innovation, investment, and consumer choice could be at stake in this deal and subsequent legal fight.