Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI Decides It’s No Longer Worried About Apple’s iPhone Monopoly

SpaceXAI, the AI division of Elon Musk's SpaceX, filed paperwork Monday in Texas federal court to drop its antitrust claims against Apple from a lawsuit it brought last year, asking the court to dismiss them with prejudice; Apple did not oppose the motion. SpaceXAI and X Corp. had sued Apple and OpenAI, alleging Apple's partnership with OpenAI gave ChatGPT an unfair advantage and that the companies were "monopolists." SpaceXAI did not move to dismiss its claims against OpenAI and is continuing to pursue that part of the lawsuit.

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 https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/gkplegaxbvb/X%20v%20Apple%20-%20filing%20-%2020260914.pdf 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 https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-xai-openai-apple-lawsuit-app-store-2000647640 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 https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-loses-openai-trial-in-dumbest-way-imaginable-2000760117 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 https://gizmodo.com/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-calls-for-pause-in-ai-development-sort-of-2000810962 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 https://gizmodo.com/apples-lawsuit-against-openai-sparks-another-musk-altman-online-spat-2000784826 . “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.