“An Unequivocal Antitrust Violation”: Elon Musk Claims Apple Blocks Any AI Firm Besides OpenAI From Reaching #1 in the App Store — But DeepSeek Already Had Its Moment in the Sun

Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk is arguably the most controversial and opinionated public figure in the tech space (so far). Last week, following GPT-5's launch, the executive claimed that "OpenAI is going to eat Microsoft alive," potentially referring to the already fraying partnership between the tech firms.

More recently, Elon Musk made a bold claim against Apple, and by extension, OpenAI via a post on X. According to Musk: "Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation."

"xAI will take immediate legal action."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quickly responded, branding Elon Musk's complaint as "remarkable." According to the executive:

However, Altman took his response a notch higher by including a link to a post from Platformer's newsletter from February 14, 2023, about Elon Musk creating a special system that shows X users all his posts first, with the caption "Lots has been said about this, here is one thing."

Per the damning report, a plethora of changes were made to X's (formerly Twitter) algorithms, including a code to automatically greenlight all of Musk's tweets. As such, the billionaire's posts can circumvent the platform's filters that are usually designed to show users the best content possible, boosting Musk's tweets instead by a factor of 1,000. This guaranteed that Musk would rank higher than anyone else in the feed.

Users quickly hopped in the thread to share concerns about the issues raised by Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Some even took the opportunity to make the best out of a bad situation by posting memes asking Grok AI if Sam Altman's claims were true.

Sam Altman concluded his response to Elon Musk's claim about OpenAI leveraging its partnership with Apple to consistently top the charts in the App Store by indicating: "I hope someone will get counter-discovery on this, I and many others would love to know what's been happening. But OpenAI will just stay focused on making great products."

Is OpenAI leveraging its partnership with Apple to maintain its lead in AI?

As you may know, Apple announced its new AI strategy — Apple Intelligence — last year. The strategy was designed to help the iPhone maker catch up with other leading AI firms in the category, including Google, Microsoft, and even Samsung.

However, insiders didn't have a lot of confidence and faith in Apple, indicating that the strategy was already 5 years behind Microsoft, while describing it as an "afterthought" with extremely low real-world usage and dismal iPhone sales conversions.

While Apple promised to integrate ChatGPT into experiences within iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, allowing users to access ChatGPT’s capabilities without needing to switch platforms. However, the company has continuously delayed Apple Intelligence's launch and has only shipped with trivial features like Writing Tools.

The company's executive revealed that they'd been working on two separate versions of the AI experience, which prompted the delayed launch.

Elsewhere, the company could land itself in legal battles for falsely using ads rife with AI experiences to push iPhone 16 sales.

Circling back to Elon Musk's claims, they might be a tad far-fetched as Chinese startup DeepSeek dethroned ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app in Apple's App Store in the US in January 2025, though it tumbled to the #51 spot after the hype.