After agreeing to somewhat of a truce with his AI rivals this weekend over the need to rein in the pace of AI development, Elon Musk now seems to be offering Apple an olive branch too.
SpaceXAI, the AI division of Musk’s SpaceX, filed paperwork Monday to drop its antitrust claims against Apple from a lawsuit it brought last year.
In a filing in Texas federal court, SpaceXAI said it had resolved its claims against Apple and asked the court to dismiss them with prejudice, meaning they can’t bring the same claims against the iPhone maker again. According to the filing, Apple did not oppose the motion. The filing, however, doesn’t say how the companies resolved their dispute or whether they reached a settlement.
SpaceXAI and X Corp., which ran Musk’s social media platform X before being folded into SpaceX, sued Apple and OpenAI last year, accusing the companies of working together to squash competing AI companies.
The lawsuit argued that Apple’s partnership with OpenAI gave ChatGPT an unfair advantage by making it the “only generative AI chatbot that benefits from billions of user prompts originating from hundreds of millions of iPhones.”
It further alleged that Apple and OpenAI are “monopolists” and accused Apple of manipulating App Store rankings to favor ChatGPT.
Apple and OpenAI both denied wrongdoing at the time. Apple argued that its partnership with OpenAI is not exclusive.
The lawsuit arrived at the height of Musk’s long-running feud with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Earlier this year, a jury sided with OpenAI in a separate lawsuit Musk filed over the company’s shift away from its original nonprofit structure, finding that Musk had waited too long to sue.
While Musk and Altman both voiced support this weekend for rival Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s proposal to slow the pace of AI development over safety risks, Musk still has it out for OpenAI. SpaceXAI notably did not move to dismiss its claims against OpenAI and is continuing to pursue that part of the lawsuit.
The timing is especially interesting because Apple now has its own beef with OpenAI.
The iPhone maker sued OpenAI and two former Apple employees who now work at Sam Altman’s startup for stealing trade secrets related to Apple’s manufacturing processes and products still in development.
Musk immediately took the opportunity, at the time, to take a shot at Altman. “Scam Altman strikes again,” Musk wrote in response to a post about the lawsuit.
SpaceX, Apple, and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.