Following Up on That xAI v. Apple and OpenAI Situation ⇥ cnbc.com

At the time I wrote about the fundamentally dishonest complaints from Elon Musk about the App Store’s ranking of Grok, a lawsuit had not been filed. Two weeks later, though, Musk followed through.

Annie Palmer, CNBC:

Elon Musk’s xAI sued Apple and OpenAI on Monday, accusing the pair of an “anticompetitive scheme” to thwart artificial intelligence rivals.

The lawsuit, filed by Musk’s AI startup xAI and its social network business X, alleges Apple and OpenAI have “colluded” to maintain monopolies in the smartphone and generative AI markets.

Iain Thomson, the Register:

It accuses Apple of downgrading other AI apps in favor of ChatGPT. While the lawsuit acknowledges iPhones can use other AI engines, it claims that OpenAI competitors don’t get enough promotion.

The lawsuit cites the list of “Must-Have Apps” posted on Sunday, in which OpenAI was the only AI app listed. Also included were Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble. Musk’s lawyers claim that Cook & Co’s statement in the T&Cs that Apple’s store “is designed to be fair and free of bias,” is a lie.

There are many problems one can find in the App Store, Apple’s editorial process, and the way OpenAI seems to be everywhere. I think xAI is a bad plaintiff for this case, however. When I wrote that Musk’s frenzied posting on X was “dishonest”, what I meant was he was inventing or exaggerating controversy to boost the app’s rankings. At the time, it was unclear whether this strategy would work. On the day I published my commentary, Grok was fifth in the U.S. in overall free downloads. The day this lawsuit was filed, it had fallen off the chart, declining steeply since. Meanwhile, Google’s Gemini has climbed from placing in the mid-fifties in mid-August to third place today. Perplexity has grown from placing in the hundreds to twenty-fifth place today. (Sensor Tower does not allow me to create permalinks of those charts, so act fast.)

Of course, even though this information appears to invalidate the lawsuit’s claim (PDF) that “Apple has deprioritized the apps of super app and generative AI chatbot competitors, like the products offered by Plaintiffs, in its App Store rankings to favor OpenAI”, it will simply feed the persecution complex of xAI. And the lawsuit raises a good point: Apple should more urgently open up third-party A.I. integration, something it said it would do. This is going to be painful to watch.