Artificial Intelligence: Musk drops antitrust lawsuit against Apple

Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul, has withdrawn his lawsuit against Apple alleging unfair competition. Musk had previously taken Apple and OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, to court about a month ago. His claim at the time was that Apple was hampering other chatbots, including Musk's own software Grok, to give ChatGPT an advantage.

Court documents revealed that the accusations against Apple had been resolved, without providing specifics on how. However, the lawsuit against OpenAI remains ongoing. Musk, who was once an early investor in OpenAI, has been at odds with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for years. He had previously accused Altman of converting OpenAI, originally a non-profit organization, into a profit-driven company and profiting from it.

Jurors in California ruled against Musk in the court case. The allegations against Apple stemmed from a 2024 announcement of a collaboration between the company and OpenAI. The collaboration would allow iPhone users and other device users to direct queries that Siri, Apple's voice assistant, couldn't answer to ChatGPT. Just before Musk's about-face, Apple rolled out a new version of Siri in the US, enhanced with artificial intelligence.

The new Siri was developed internally by Apple, and Google's AI model Gemini was used as the basis for some of its functions. Musk had claimed Apple was a monopoly in the US smartphone market, holding a 65% share, and OpenAI held a 80% monopoly over AI chatbots. This formed the basis for his accusations of anti-competitive behavior.

The lawsuit aimed for both damages and a ban on the collaboration. At the time of the lawsuit, Musk's chatbot Grok was under criticism for making antisemitic remarks and praising Adolf Hitler, which was attributed to a programming error. Grok was later abandoned by Musk as he shifted focus to his space company SpaceX.