Is xAI’s lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI at odds with Elon Musk’s Grok boasts?

Elon Musk
In August 2025, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, filed a lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI in a Texas federal court, alleging anticompetitive practices in the Apple App Store’s rankings and recommendations. The suit claims Apple unfairly favors OpenAI’s ChatGPT, particularly through its integration with Siri and prominent placement in the App Store’s “Must-Have Apps” section, suppressing xAI’s Grok chatbot and limiting competition in the AI market. Musk argues this constitutes an antitrust violation.
Austin Carr for Bloomberg News:
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Elon Musk can’t understand why his Grok chatbot isn’t No. 1 in Apple Inc.’s App Store in the US. He’s been bemoaning the lack of recognition ad nauseum [sic nauseam] in X posts lately, griping how Apple recently failed to feature Grok on its list of trending artificial intelligence services or recommend it as a “must-have” app.
It’s hard to say competition has been stifled in AI… the AI landscape, particularly on Apple’s iOS, is red-hot with chatbots. If anything, Musk’s frequent X posts about the App Store ups and downs of Grok, which often ranks very highly, are a reminder of how intense the AI war is.
It’s also not impossible for a ChatGPT rival to hit No. 1 on the store charts: China’s DeepSeek did so in January with scant resources and name recognition.
Another wrinkle with xAI’s lawsuit is that it claims the Apple-OpenAI deal has technically harmed Grok. Because “billions of user prompts” from iPhones will now flow into and thus improve ChatGPT’s brain as a result of the partnership… [But] just this month alone, Musk has boasted that “Grok is evolving much faster than any other AI,” and that it’s the best at coding, predicting the future and has the best voice interface. And on the day OpenAI introduced its latest GPT-5 model, Musk retorted that xAI’s most powerful model was “smarter 2 weeks ago.”
It’s challenging to reconcile Musk’s social media posts with his lawyers’ arguments.

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MacDailyNews Take: Grok is arguably better than ChatGPT in many situations. You might say that Grok is the Macintosh of GenAI while ChatGPT is the Windows. Apple would be smart to sign a deal with Grok, and other GenAI firms, and allow users to choose which GenAI model(s) underpin Apple Intelligence features, but that would require management to Think different®.
xAI’s legal team can reconcile Musk’s X posts touting Grok’s superiority with the lawsuit claiming deprivation of “billions of user prompts,” by explaining that claim applies to a subset of GenAI, namely general knowledge, not for all genAI aspects.
ChatGPT-5 leads in general knowledge, enterprise integration, and context window size, making it ideal for broad applications. Grok 4 outperforms in mathematical and scientific reasoning, as well as coding efficiency, excelling in specialized, technical applications. Benchmark results can vary by task, but Grok 4’s real-time capabilities give it an edge in dynamic scenarios, while ChatGPT-5 is more suited to mainstream users.
An Apple Intelligence that allows users to specify, say, ChatGPT for search and Grok for coding, scientific modeling, etc. would be a better Apple Intelligence.

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