Without providing evidence, Tesla’s Elon Musk accuses Apple of favoring OpenAI

Other AI apps have topped the App Store, including Grok.

8/12/25 7:40AM

On Monday night, Tesla and xAI CEO Elon Musk posted on X saying that Apple is keeping AI companies other than OpenAI from reaching the No. 1 spot in its App Store, calling it “an unequivocal antitrust violation.” Musk provided no proof of wrongdoing by Apple beyond pointing out that Apple has a partnership with OpenAI to use ChatGPT on its AI iPhones.

Other AI apps have previously ranked No. 1 among Top Free Apps on Apple’s US App Store — including xAI’s Grok. Earlier this year, Grok spent several days atop the App Store before being once again bested by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, according to Appfigures.

Top free App Store Aug 12, 2025 — Sherwood News

ChatGPT is a consumer favorite, with people choosing it over other AI assistants licensed by their companies, while Grok as recently as last month was in the news for praising Hitler. China’s DeepSeek also topped the App Store earlier this year. Both Grok and DeepSeek ranked No. 1 after Apple announced its OpenAI partnership back in 2024. Today, Grok is No. 5 while ChatGPT is No. 1.

Musk has been on a publicity push lately for Grok 4, offering it for free and advertising its image and video-generation tool Grok Imagine.

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.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2025

Rani Molla14m

Meta’s AI video feed Vibes, which launched in late September as part of the Meta AI app, has 2 million daily active users, Business Insiders reports, citing internal data. That’s more than OpenAI’s Sora, which launched around the same time but only recently — and perhaps temporarily — became available to the public without an invite. It had about 673,000 daily active users in November, according to Similarweb.

Still, for Meta, 2 million isn’t much for a product that’s integrated with Facebook and Instagram. Threads, another app Meta users are pushed to from its larger properties, for example, recently surpassed 150 million daily active users. In its last earnings report, Meta said it had 3.5 billion daily users across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.

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We are starting to see the appification of ChatGPT.

Last month, OpenAI announced its refreshed vision for app integration within ChatGPT, announcing deals with Spotify, Zillow, and Figma to allow those companies’ customers to use the apps right within the chatbot.

Today, Intuit is joining the lineup, bringing its products into ChatGPT. TurboxTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp will come to ChatGPT as part of a $100 million multiyear partnership between Intuit and OpenAI.

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OpenAI, Intuit Strike Strategic Partnership

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Though much of America might have been asleep for some of the most frustrating periods of disruption this morning, thousands of users across the US and around the world have taken to Downdetector to report problems accessing some of the internet’s biggest platforms, including OpenAI, X, and popular battle arena game “League of Legends,” as Cloudflare has been acknowledging its issues and looking to fix them.

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Without providing evidence, Tesla’s Elon Musk accuses Apple of favoring OpenAI

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