Tesla CEO Elon Musk is taking his war against Apple and OpenAI to court. On Monday, Musk’s companies X (Twitter) and xAI filed a lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI, alleging the two companies had conspired to establish monopolies in the rapidly expanding AI chatbot market. Musk’s legal action comes weeks after he accused Apple of deliberately promoting OpenAI’s ChatGPT while actively suppressing his own xAI chatbot Grok.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, goes far beyond complaints about App Store rankings. Musk’s legal filing alleges an exclusive deal between Apple and OpenAI in which ChatGPT is “deeply integrated” into the iPhone in a way that rivals cannot match. The deal, Musk argues, effectively locks Apple’s users into using ChatGPT by building it into the default system chatbot and “embedding” ChatGPT into various Apple features and products. This arrangement, which Musk argues is in violation of antitrust and unfair competition laws, risks scuttling his long-stated vision of building an “everything app” on top of the Twitter platform, which he purchased in 2022.

The lawsuit states that Apple “promises to integrate ChatGPT exclusively into iOS as the default chatbot” for Siri, its new Writing Tools, and other features. This, the complaint charges, allows OpenAI exclusive access to “tens of billions of user prompts,” critical data that X argues is used to “train, test, improve, and scale” AI models. If Apple only gives this access to OpenAI and no one else, Musk’s lawsuit claims, then other chatbot models, like Grok, cannot scale. Chatbots are already data intensive, and X estimates that OpenAI already controls at least 80 percent of the market, a percentage that could become 100 percent once the Apple integration is complete.

“Generative AI chatbots would vigorously compete with one another in a fair market,” the lawsuit states. “Instead, defendants’ anticompetitive conduct has handed a substantial portion of the market to ChatGPT.”

The filing also states that Apple and OpenAI stand to benefit financially from the arrangement at the expense of consumers. In the case of OpenAI, its terms of service for the API allow it to analyze “large amounts of data” to train its models. Apple’s integration of ChatGPT will not only give OpenAI a head start in chatbot technology, but it will give it exclusive access to billions of data points. If Apple continues to “press its thumb firmly on the scale for ChatGPT,” investors will see little value in funding a competitor, the lawsuit notes.

Apple, for its part, also reaps enormous benefit from a dominant chatbot model. According to the lawsuit, research showed that if users are presented with options, they generally select Apple’s default. Siri processed 1.5 billion requests per day on average in 2024, more than the combined total of all chatbot prompts that year. If OpenAI is the only model receiving those billions of requests, X estimates OpenAI can control anywhere from 35-55 percent of all potential chatbot usage. By locking Apple users into ChatGPT, Apple “maintains a customer base that keeps buying and using iPhones, including the newest, most expensive models,” X’s lawsuit states.

In a statement to Ars Technica, OpenAI dismissed Musk’s lawsuit as part of his “ongoing pattern of harassment,” while Apple has so far declined to comment.

The lawsuit may end up being one of the most important decisions in the evolving generative AI landscape. If a court finds that Apple and OpenAI did conspire to unfairly establish monopolies, Musk and his companies may be granted a temporary injunction on Apple’s integration of ChatGPT. If they win, Grok could have a fair shot at challenging ChatGPT, and Musk may be able to continue with his vision of building a super app on top of Twitter. If a court rules in Apple and OpenAI’s favor, Musk’s super app ambitions will be thwarted, and OpenAI and Apple may be able to keep stymieing rivals, either through App Store manipulation or preferential inclusion. Either way, a court’s decision on this case will likely influence how open, or closed, the coming age of AI will be.