In a lawsuit filed on Monday, Musk accused Apple and OpenAI of anticompetitive collusion designed to cement their respective monopolies in a rapidly growing artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot market.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Musk’s companies X (Twitter) and xAI, follows a similar public complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission last month, alleging the “secretive deal” is designed to make ChatGPT “more powerful at the expense of rival chatbots and to the detriment of Apple’s own customers.” It also comes weeks after Musk first attacked Apple for ranking OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the top “Have” app in the App Store, while his own chatbot Grok languishes out of sight.

But the filing goes well beyond App Store rankings, alleging Apple and OpenAI have forged an “exclusive and collusive agreement” that gives ChatGPT unprecedented access to iPhone features while excluding all rivals from Apple’s vast user base. “The Deal not only provides OpenAI and ChatGPT with an unfair head start over competitors, but it also effectively forecloses competitors from even beginning to compete with ChatGPT on Apple devices,” the suit states.

Musk’s legal complaint, which demands billions of dollars in damages and an injunction against the OpenAI-Apple deal, could ultimately determine the future of what Musk has called an “everything app,” a super platform that uses AI chatbots and other tools to do it all. If Musk can’t use Twitter to compete with the world’s most dominant smartphone, he argues that Apple and OpenAI’s deal is a “death knell” for X and its AI development.

In the lawsuit, X argues Apple’s integration of ChatGPT as the default chatbot on iOS effectively monopolizes the chatbot market by providing OpenAI with “billions of user prompts and other data points that it can use to further improve its AI chatbot model.” This data is, as X lawyer Matt Olsen put it at a press conference Monday, “the lifeblood of AI development.”

Apple’s share of the chatbot market, according to the complaint, has allowed OpenAI to “corner at least 80 percent of the market.” With ChatGPT baked directly into iOS, that figure, X argues, will only grow. “In one fell swoop, the Deal gives ChatGPT an immediate and enduring market share far beyond that of any rival chatbot and dramatically increases ChatGPT’s market share over time,” the complaint states.

In addition to copying Apple, Musk has also alleged a pattern of anticompetitive behavior by Apple, including repeated rejections of xAI’s requests for iOS integrations for Grok, including at the launch of the new “Imagine” feature in April, and allegedly even direct intervention to keep Grok from being featured in the App Store. The lawsuit similarly reiterates accusations that Apple manipulated App Store rankings and delayed Grok’s updates in a targeted campaign to “squelch competition.”

Grok’s fate isn’t the only thing at stake. At least 1.5 billion Siri requests were sent each day in 2024, a larger potential prompt volume than the sum of all other generative AI chatbots combined, according to the lawsuit. If OpenAI is the exclusive beneficiary, its market share of all chatbot interactions could total up to 55 percent.

From here, the lawsuit paints a grim picture of what that dominant share could mean for the broader AI market and, by extension, Apple’s customers. With Apple’s lock on “entry” to its huge user base, chatbot providers like xAI can’t hope to build competitive services and may be priced out of the market entirely. If Apple continues “pressing its thumb firmly on the scale” on ChatGPT, the lawsuit states, that means “investors will see little reason to invest in competitive chatbots that Apple has consistently and predictably devalued.”

In other words, Apple’s enormous share of the mobile market and its willingness to bend it to one favored app may not just strangle Grok but stifle all rivals, creating a harmful feedback loop in which talent goes to Big Tech companies that dominate entire markets, while a “developer brain drain” robs startups of new ideas and growth potential.

As for what Apple and OpenAI get in return, the deal is as one-sided as it gets. According to the lawsuit, OpenAI gave Apple ChatGPT for free, essentially writing the company’s own check to fund the deal, while Apple admitted the ChatGPT integration was a loss-leader for the next 10 years. The companies’ willingness to do that, X argued in the lawsuit, suggests they value the arrangement less for any short-term revenue it might generate and more as a strategic move to make it impossible for rivals to compete.

“By making the Deal exclusive, Apple sacrificed the profits it would have earned by integrating multiple chatbots and instead reaped a much different sort of benefit: it achieved OpenAI’s agreement to block competitors,” the lawsuit states. “The true motive was Apple and OpenAI’s shared goal of blocking competition.”

Apple and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but OpenAI dismissed the lawsuit to Ars Technica as just the latest in “Musk’s ongoing pattern of harassment against Apple.”