Apple has delivered a sharp legal counterpunch to Elon Musk's antitrust claims, asking a federal judge to toss out his lawsuit over the company's OpenAI partnership. The iPhone maker's lawyers dismissed Musk's allegations as "speculation on top of speculation," marking the latest escalation in the billionaire's war against AI industry consolidation that could reshape how tech giants form AI alliances.
Apple just threw down the legal gauntlet against Elon Musk's increasingly aggressive campaign against AI industry partnerships. In court filings submitted Tuesday and reported by Bloomberg, the company's legal team delivered a withering response to Musk's antitrust lawsuit, characterizing his claims of competitive harm as nothing more than "speculation on top of speculation."
The legal drama stems from Musk's August lawsuit through his companies xAI and X Corp, which accused Apple of deliberately rigging App Store rankings to favor OpenAI's ChatGPT while suppressing competing AI chatbots like Grok and X's own AI features. But Apple's lawyers aren't having it, arguing that Musk's companies have failed to "plausibly" demonstrate any actual harm from the tech giant's AI partnership strategy.
At the heart of Apple's defense is a crucial technical distinction that could reshape how courts view AI partnerships. The company emphasizes that its agreement with OpenAI is "expressly not exclusive," meaning there's nothing preventing other AI companies from securing similar deals. This non-exclusive framing directly challenges Musk's core antitrust theory that Apple is creating an illegal monopoly around ChatGPT integration.
The timing couldn't be more significant for the broader AI industry. Apple's ChatGPT integration represents one of the first major consumer-facing AI partnerships between a dominant platform and an AI provider, setting precedent for how these relationships might work. If Musk succeeds, it could force Apple and other platform holders to open their AI integration programs to any competitor, regardless of technical capability or quality standards.
Apple's legal team went further, noting it's "widely known" that the company plans to partner with additional AI chatbots beyond OpenAI. This suggests Apple is already building a multi-vendor AI strategy that could include partnerships with Google's Bard, Anthropic's Claude, or even eventually Musk's own Grok - assuming it meets Apple's technical and quality standards.
