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Elon Musk is suing Apple and OpenAI. The billionaire made that official on Monday in a legal complaint (PDF) that argues the companies are colluding to create monopolies in a burgeoning sector: AI chatbots. The lawsuit escalates weeks of public sparring between Musk and Apple following the tech giant’s exclusive integration of OpenAI’s ChatGPT into iOS 18.

Musk and his companies, xAI and X, argue in the complaint that the Apple-OpenAI deal grants ChatGPT unprecedented access to iPhone features that no competitors can match, effectively cutting rivals off from Apple’s hundreds of millions of users. In antitrust and unfair competition charges, Musk claims Apple and OpenAI are “pressing their thumbs firmly on the scale to benefit ChatGPT and, by extension, OpenAI.”

The suit says Musk’s long-awaited vision of creating an “everything app” (akin to China’s WeChat) by building on the foundation of Twitter is now in danger because Apple is preventing X’s chatbot, Grok, from being able to fairly compete.

At Apple’s invitation, ChatGPT has been integrated with iOS as the default chatbot across Siri, Apple’s Writing Tools, and dozens of other features. OpenAI receives a billion free user prompts every day as a result, X argues in the filing. Chatbots need as much data as possible to train their models, and Grok, as the only major competitor to OpenAI, is being stymied, the filing claims.

X filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, and it is asking for billions in damages, including Apple’s revenue from ChatGPT, as well as a permanent injunction on Apple’s exclusive integration with ChatGPT. In a statement to Ars Technica, OpenAI said the filing is “meritless” and the latest salvo in Musk’s “ongoing pattern of harassment.” Apple declined to comment.

In public comments since announcing the iOS 18 features in June, Musk has cited a 2023 survey in which the majority of new iPhone buyers said they would give up their devices if an alternative to Apple were available. Apple, X argues, “feels a mortal threat to its iPhone monopoly from the rise of multimodal, generative AI models.” Musk’s filing even cites Apple executive Eddy Cue as expressing concerns that AI advances could “destroy Apple’s smartphone business.”

Chatbots Already Grabbing Large Share of Market

Apple and OpenAI are even allegedly agreeing to share information about features for each company to consider, the lawsuit claims. “Apple and OpenAI may even be working on a next-generation ChatGPT that will offer conversational AI directly on the lock screen, further capitalizing on their alleged secret handshake,” Musk’s filing states.

The new features and integrations are helping OpenAI build a market-leading share in a still-nascent field. The chatbot has at least an 80 percent market share, according to Musk’s lawsuit, though that estimate is based on several high-profile launches, including Microsoft’s Bing chatbot.

But while many bots have launched and some will surely gain traction as well, Apple and OpenAI’s cozier integration will entrench OpenAI, the suit states. Siri handled 1.5 billion requests per day across the globe in 2024—more than the total number of user prompts to all other generative AI chatbots that year, the complaint notes. If OpenAI is the only company receiving prompts from Apple’s Siri and other features, Apple is in effect giving OpenAI control over up to 55 percent of all potential chatbot conversations, the suit states.

OpenAI’s major lead, Musk is arguing, will create a moat that forecloses the market to potential rivals and innovations. A deal with Google would be just one example, according to Musk’s suit. However, “that is not how things have worked out in the real world, because Apple rejected all of xAI’s attempts to integrate Grok with iOS.”

The move to an AI chat interface is not without precedent for Apple. The company has long had a default search engine on iPhones in the form of Google. The Justice Department sued Google in 2023 for that deal, arguing the exclusivity of the arrangement is a barrier to competition in the search engine market.

The complaint likens the two deals, suggesting Apple refused to consider offering a choice of chatbots to iPhone users in the way it has maintained Google as the default for decades.

If Apple does not allow multiple search engines or multiple chatbots, most people will use only one. The overwhelming majority of people around the world with any type of digital device will use ChatGPT, and will never even become aware of or know how to access Grok or any other chatbot.

The result, Musk argues, will be less innovation, higher prices for consumers, fewer choices of AI chatbots, and anticompetitive behavior by both Apple and OpenAI. Apple, for example, could even begin to charge for iOS features the company has long provided for free, Musk suggests, given OpenAI’s lead in chatbot market share.

Apple has demonstrated no interest in the financial bottom line of its agreements with OpenAI so far, X argues in its lawsuit. In its first year of the partnership, Apple is not expected to make any money on ChatGPT; instead, the vast majority of the billions in forecasted revenues will go to OpenAI. (Apple gets a cut of services purchased through Siri and Search, for example, and may have access to ChatGPT Plus subscription revenue.) OpenAI, meanwhile, is paying Apple rather than the other way around: It provided ChatGPT to Apple for free, according to the filing.