Apple Refutes Elon Musk's Claim Of App Store Bias Against Grok

Say what you will about Elon Musk, but the man is never boring. In keeping with Musk's tendency to make headlines and remain perpetually aggrieved, the mercurial Tesla CEO and head of X earlier this week blasted Apple for not promoting X's AI app, Grok, on the App Store in the "Must Have" section. Not only that, but Musk went so far as to threaten legal action against Apple.

"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." In the wake of Musk's comment, Apple late on Tuesday provided a response to Bloomberg.

"The App Store is designed to be fair and free of bias," the company said. "We feature thousands of apps through charts, algorithmic recommendations, and curated lists selected by experts using objective criteria." Apple then went on to say, "Our goal is to offer safe discovery for users and valuable opportunities for developers, collaborating with many to increase app visibility in rapidly evolving categories."

Musk's claims, upon which his hypothetical lawsuit is based, are laughably off-base. The idea that Apple is purposefully preventing AI apps besides OpenAI from reaching the top spot on the App Store is demonstrably false. What's more, Musk's claims were even debunked by X's Community Notes feature.

Diving in, recall that the DeepSeek AI app from a Chinese startup was the #1 app on the App Store back in January 2025. Additionally, Perplexity's AI app reached the top spot on India's App Store this past July. It's worth mentioning that both DeepSeek and Perplexity AI reached the top of the charts well after Apple announced its partnership with OpenAI. If Apple actually had a sinister plan to keep other AI apps off the App Store charts, it's doing a horrible job. Incidentally, there have been rumors regarding Apple's potential interest in purchasing Perplexity AI.

Following Musk's allegations, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman chimed in on X and insinuated that Musk was being hypocritical in light of what he "does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn't like." Musk, predictably, fired back and called Altman a "liar."

Altman does have a point in this particular instance. You might recall that Musk at one point had his engineers tweak the X algorithm to artificially boost his own tweets. Even outside of X, it's worth mentioning that Tesla isn't exactly keen on integrating non-Grok AI assistants into its infotainment system.

There may be some simple reasons behind Apple's decision not to promote Grok in its "Must Have" section. First and foremost, Grok features an image and video generator with a "spicy mode" that is, not surprisingly, NSFW. So, while Apple won't actively prevent a given app from rising to the top of the App Store, there's no reason Apple would in turn promote an app with a feature set that doesn't exactly align with Apple's own brand and values.

Further, you might recall that Grok just last month generated a wave of bad press after it started spewing an endless stream of racist and antisemitic answers along with other hateful and inappropriate content. In a sense, Grok went rogue after being influenced by bad actors online. Ultimately, X addressed the issue with Musk noting that changes were made to improve the chatbot.

Lastly, the "Must Have" section on the App Store is clearly curated by Apple's in-house team. In turn, it's worth noting that Musk over the past few years hasn't exactly been shy about taking shots at the company and Tim Cook. In other words, it's not exactly surprising that Apple isn't actively promoting Grok, nor is it under any legal obligation to do so. If Musk actually took Apple to court, it's hard to see his path to victory.