Two tech giants are at war. Elon Musk accused Apple on Tuesday of promoting Openai and his artificial intelligence assistant (AI) Chatgpt on the App Store, its application download platform. To assert his rights, he even threatened the Californian prosecution firm.
“Apple acts so as to make it impossible for any company of AI other than Optai to reach first place on the App Store, which constitutes a manifest violation of competition rules,” said the billionaire on his social network XA, his IA company who developed the Assistant IA Grok, “will immediately take legal action,” he added.
A crucial platform for publishers
The App Store allows you to download applications on iPhones and other appliances of the apple brand. This platform is crucial for publishers who hope to be chosen by consumers. It highlights the most popular applications of the moment, in different categories, depending in particular of opinions, notes and the number of downloads.
Under Musk’s message on X, users have added context notes (the system of combating disinformation on the social network), citing press articles with titles such as “in January 2025, Deepseek was the number 1 app all categories on the App Store”. Deepseek is a Chinese IA start-up which became known this year thanks to the popularity of its eponymous AI assistant.
Elon Musk was part of the team of 11 people who founded Openai in 2015, providing initial funding of $ 45 million. But he left the company in 2018 and continues to attack it since the phenomenal success of Chatgpt at the end of 2022. He also undertook legal action against the star of Silicon Valley who, according to him, would also have her values, and also proposed to buy it.
Apple in the viewfinder of justice
Like the other giants of technologies, Apple faces legal proceedings on the part of the American and European competition authorities. His app store is in particular at the heart of an argument that has been going on for several years with Epic Games, the publisher of the Fortnite video game.
Our file on artificial intelligence
According to Epic and other developers, Google and Apple have a duopoly on the mobile applications market with their iOS and Android mobile operating systems, and abuse their dominant position by imposing their own download and payment platforms, and by taking important commissions on user expenses. An American court said at the end of 2021 that Apple could no longer impose on the publishers of applications to go through the App Store and its payment system.