Apple has rejected accusations from Elon Musk that its App Store stifles competiton, insisting it is “designed to be free and fair of bias.” <\/p>\n
X owner Musk has threatened Apple with legal action after claiming it had made it “impossible” for apps to compete with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI in the store<\/p>\n
He also called OpenAI boss Sam Altman a “liar” – after Altman claimed Musk used his platform to “benefit himself and his own companies”.<\/p>\n
The row is the latest flashpoint in what is an ongoing feud between the billionaires who co-founded OpenAI – but now fiercely compete after Musk left the firm.<\/p>\n
Apple announced a partnership with ChatGPT in June 2024 – but there is no suggestion Apple favours one app over the other, and several rival AI apps such as DeepSeek and Perplexity have topped the App Store charts since then.<\/p>\n
In a statement sent to the BBC, Apple said: “We feature thousands of apps through charts, algorithmic recommendations and curated lists selected by experts using objective criteria.”<\/p>\n
In a later post Musk took aim at Apple again, asking the firm why it would not promote X – or its AI app Grok – in the “Must Have” section of the App Store.<\/p>\n
“X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps,” he said in a post<\/a> now pinned to his X profile.<\/p>\n ChatGPT is currently the most downloaded free app in the UK, with Grok a close third. X does not make the top 40.<\/p>\n This seemed to draw the attention of Altman, who linked to a report by tech newsletter Platformer which claimed Musk had made his own personal X posts more prominent in people’s feeds.<\/p>\n The feud between Musk and Altman has, over time, encompassed a slew of lawsuits, email dumps and social media digs.<\/p>\n Their rivalry can be traced back a decade, with Musk’s now public belief that OpenAI, under Altman’s leadership, abandoned the principles he and others used to found it in 2015.<\/p>\n The firm was created with the intention of building artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI that can perform any task that a human being is capable of – but by making its technology open-source and promising to “benefit humanity”.<\/p>\n OpenAI was also set up as a not-for-profit company, meaning it would not aim to make money, but in 2019 it established a for-profit arm which Musk felt was antithetical to its original mission.<\/p>\n Musk argued in his March 2024 lawsuit that the firm had instead been focusing on “maximising profits” for its major investor Microsoft.<\/p>\n And while he unexpectedly dropped<\/a> his lawsuit last year, OpenAI then filed a counter-suit against him in April.<\/p>\n