Elon Musk and Sam Altman's turbulent relationship has erupted into another public confrontation.
The world's richest man is now threatening legal action against Apple while the OpenAI CEO fires back with accusations of his own.
The two tech titans have a complicated history dating back to 2015, when they co-founded OpenAI with approximately $1 billion in funding. Their original mission was to develop advanced neural networks capable of human-like interaction and creative tasks.
However, the alliance broke down when Altman advocated for a structure that would allow the organisation to raise capital while maintaining its humanitarian goals.
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Musk opposed this transition and eventually left OpenAI's board in 2018, partly due to disagreements over this direction and warned lawmakers about AI as an 'existential risk' to humanity just two years later.
Why might Musk sue Apple?
Over the past year, Musk has filed multiple lawsuits aimed at preventing Altman from converting OpenAI into a for-profit company. In February, he offered $97.4 billion to buy the company outright, claiming he wanted to preserve its original mission of ensuring 'artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.' The proposal was quickly rejected by Altman.
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Now their feud has expanded to include Apple, with Musk accusing the tech giant of unfairly favouring OpenAI on iOS.
"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," Musk posted on his owned platform, X. "xAI will take immediate legal action."
In response, Altman fired back with: "This is a remarkable claim given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn't like."
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Apple and OpenAI's partnership
According to Bloomberg, Apple and OpenAI have formed a partnership to integrate AI features into the latest iPhones.
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ChatGPT currently ranks as the most-downloaded free iPhone app in the US, while Musk's Grok sits at number five.
The SpaceX founder has spent the last day or so expressing frustration about X's visibility on Apple's App Store, agreeing with the claim that the platform is 'almost impossible to find'.
In another post, Musk added: “Why do you refuse to put either X or Grok in your ‘Must Have’ section when X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps? Are you playing politics?”
The Tesla CEO also pointed out that Apple doesn't mention Grok in its AI section despite his claims that it's the 'smartest AI in the world on the toughest tests.'
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On Thursday (7 August), OpenAI revealed GPT-5, describing it as their most advanced large-scale AI model yet, following xAI's release of Grok 4 last month.