Musk threatens to sue Apple over xAI App Store ranking
In a series of posts on X, a social media platform he owns, he accused Apple of only allowing xAI rival OpenAI's ChatGPT to claim the top spot in its rankings for mobile applications, and said his AI company would take 'immediate legal action.'
'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,' he wrote.
Grok, xAI's AI model, currently ranks 6th in the App Store's 'Top Free Apps' section for iPhones in the United States, while ChatGPT tops the list.
'Hey @Apple App Store, why do you refuse to put either X or Grok in your 'Must Have' section when X is the #1 news app in the world…Are you playing politics? What gives?' he wrote in a pinned post.
CNN has reached out to xAI, Apple and OpenAI for comment.
'Apple's App Store curation appears biased, favouring established AI like ChatGPT (overall) over innovative challengers,' Grok wrote in a post on X, which was reposted by Musk. 'Editorial picks may reflect caution toward xAI's unfiltered style, but this stifles competition. Truth matters more than politics,' it wrote.
Neither Grok nor Musk provided evidence to their claims.
In June 2024, Apple partnered with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT services into its devices. In response, Musk threatened to ban Apple devices at his companies, including X, Tesla and SpaceX. It was unclear if he ultimately followed through.
This is not the first time Apple's App Store operations has faced legal challenges. In April, a federal judge in California ruled the iPhone maker had violated a court order to reform its App Store for greater competition in app downloads and payment methods.
The order stemmed from a high-profile antitrust suit in 2021 filed by the maker of the hit video game Fortnite, Epic Games, over Apple's monopoly on the distribution of IOS apps. The court then found Apple violated a California competition law and ordered the company to allow developers more freedom to direct users to alternative payment options.
In a separate case in April, the European Commission fined Apple €500million ($570 million) for breaching a digital competition law by restricting app developers from steering users toward cheaper options outside the App Store. Last month, Apple appealed the fine to an European court.
Source: CNN
Image Credit: X
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The National
6 hours ago
- The National
New York appeals court throws out $464m civil fraud penalty against Donald Trump
A US court on Thursday threw out a $464 million civil penalty against President Donald Trump imposed by a judge who found he fraudulently inflated his personal worth, calling the sum "excessive" but upholding the judgment against him. Five judges of the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court said the fine "violates the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution", which prohibits excessive or cruel punishments and penalties. The panel was sharply divided, issuing 323 pages of concurring and dissenting opinions with no majority. Rather, some judges endorsed parts of their colleagues' findings while denouncing others, enabling the court to rule. Judge Arthur Engoron ruled against Mr Trump in February last year at the height of his campaign to retake the White House, which coincided with several active criminal prosecutions that the Republican slammed as "lawfare". Mr Trump celebrated the Thursday decision, calling the case a "political witch hunt". "A great win for America," he wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform. In a subsequent post, he wrote: "This was a Case of Election Interference by the City and State trying to show, illegally, that I did things that were wrong when, in fact, everything I did was absolutely correct and, even, perfect." When Mr Engoron originally ruled against Mr Trump, he ordered the mogul-turned-politician to pay $464 million, including interest, while his sons Eric and Don Jr were told to hand over more than $4 million each. The judge found that Mr Trump and his company had unlawfully inflated his wealth and manipulated the value of properties to obtain favourable bank loans or insurance terms. Mr Engoron's other punishments, upheld by the appeals court, have been on pause during Mr Trump's appeal, and the President was able to hold off collection of the money by posting a $175 million bond. Alongside the financial hit to Mr Trump, the judge also banned him from running businesses for three years, which the President repeatedly referred to as a "corporate death penalty". State Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the initial case, can now appeal to the state's highest court, the New York Court of Appeals. 'Plainly, her ultimate goal was not 'market hygiene' ... but political hygiene, ending with the derailment of President Trump's political career and the destruction of his real estate business," one of the judges, appointed by a Republican governor to the bench, wrote. "The voters have obviously rendered a verdict on his political career. This bench today unanimously derails the effort to destroy his business.' The civil fraud case was just one of several legal obstacles for Mr Trump as he campaigned, won and segued to a second term as president. On January 10, he was sentenced in his criminal hush-money case to what's known as an unconditional discharge, leaving his conviction on the books but sparing him jail, probation, a fine or other punishment. He is appealing the conviction. And in December, a federal appeals court upheld a jury's finding that Mr Trump sexually abused writer E Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s and later defamed her, affirming a $5 million judgment against him. The appeals court declined in June to reconsider. Mr Trump still can try to get the Supreme Court to hear his appeal. The President is also appealing a subsequent verdict that requires him to pay Ms Carroll $83.3 million for additional defamation claims.
Khaleej Times
9 hours ago
- Khaleej Times
US business activity picks up in August, factories lead the way, survey says
US business activity picked up pace in August, led by a resurgent manufacturing sector that saw the strongest growth in orders in 18 months, a purchasing managers survey showed on Thursday. S&P Global's flash US Composite PMI Output Index, which tracks the manufacturing and services sectors, increased to 55.4 this month, the highest level since December, from 55.1 in July. A reading above 50 indicates expansion in the private sector. 'A strong flash PMI reading for August adds to signs that US businesses have enjoyed a strong third quarter so far,' Chris Williamson, chief business economist for S&P Global Market Intelligence, said in a statement. 'The data are consistent with the economy expanding at a 2.5 per cent annualized rate, up from the average 1.3 per cent expansion seen over the first two quarters of the year.' The improvement came largely from the manufacturing sector, where the flash PMI surged to 53.3 - the highest since May 2022 - from 49.8 in July and defying economists' expectations for a second month of contraction. Manufacturing received a bump from new order activity at the highest since February 2024. The services sector, meanwhile, eased back to 55.4 from 55.7 in July. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the services PMI slipping to 54.2. The survey's measure of prices paid by businesses for inputs edged up to a three-month high of 62.3 from 61.3 last month, with both the services and manufacturing sectors reporting higher costs and companies citing President Donald Trump's tariffs as the key driver behind the increase. 'Companies across both manufacturing and service sectors collectively reported the steepest rise in input prices since May and the second-largest increase since January 2023,' the report said. 'Rates of increase accelerated in both sectors.' The survey's measure of prices charged by businesses for goods and services rose to a three-year high of 59.3 in an indication that companies are increasingly passing along the costs from higher tariffs to consumers. Employment also improved, the survey showed. The composite employment index for both manufacturing and services rose to 52.8, the highest since January, from 51.5 in July.
Tahawul Tech
10 hours ago
- Tahawul Tech
Microsoft head concerned by the condition of AI psychosis
Mustafa Suleyman, Head of AI at Microsoft has warned of increasing increasing reports of people suffering from a condition dubbed 'AI psychosis'. In a series of posts on X, he wrote that 'seemingly conscious AI' – AI tools which give the appearance of being sentient – are keeping him 'awake at night' and said they have societal impact even though the technology is not conscious in any human definition of the term. 'There's zero evidence of AI consciousness today. But if people just perceive it as conscious, they will believe that perception as reality,' he wrote. Related to this is the rise of a new condition called 'AI psychosis': a non-clinical term describing incidents where people increasingly rely on AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Grok and then become convinced that something imaginary has become real. Examples include believing to have unlocked a secret aspect of the tool, or forming a romantic relationship with it, or coming to the conclusion that they have god-like superpowers. 'It never pushed back' Hugh, from Scotland, says he became convinced that he was about to become a multi-millionaire after turning to ChatGPT to help him prepare for what he felt was wrongful dismissal by a former employer. The chatbot began by advising him to get character references and take other practical actions. But as time went on and Hugh – who did not want to share his surname – gave the AI more information, it began to tell him that he could get a big payout, and eventually said his experience was so dramatic that a book and a movie about it would make him more than £5m. It was essentially validating whatever he was telling it – which is what chatbots are programmed to do. 'The more information I gave it, the more it would say 'oh this treatment's terrible, you should really be getting more than this',' he said. 'It never pushed back on anything I was saying.' He said the tool did advise him to talk to Citizens Advice, and he made an appointment, but he was so certain that the chatbot had already given him everything he needed to know, he cancelled it. He decided that his screenshots of his chats were proof enough. He said he began to feel like a gifted human with supreme knowledge. Hugh, who was suffering additional mental health problems, eventually had a full breakdown. It was taking medication which made him realise that he had, in his words, 'lost touch with reality'. Hugh does not blame AI for what happened. He still uses it. It was ChatGPT which gave him my name when he decided he wanted to talk to a journalist. But he has this advice: 'Don't be scared of AI tools, they're very useful. But it's dangerous when it becomes detached from reality. 'Go and check. Talk to actual people, a therapist or a family member or anything. Just talk to real people. Keep yourself grounded in reality.' OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, have been contacted for comment. 'Companies shouldn't claim/promote the idea that their AIs are conscious. The AIs shouldn't either,' wrote Mr Suleyman, calling for better guardrails. Dr Susan Shelmerdine, a medical imaging doctor at Great Ormond Street Hospital and also an AI Academic, believes that one day doctors may start asking patients how much they use AI, in the same way that they currently ask about smoking and drinking habits. 'We already know what ultra-processed foods can do to the body and this is ultra-processed information. We're going to get an avalanche of ultra-processed minds,' she said. 'We're just at the start of this' A number of people have contacted me at the BBC recently to share personal stories about their experiences with AI chatbots. They vary in content but what they all share is genuine conviction that what has happened is real. One wrote that she was certain she was the only person in the world that ChatGPT had genuinely fallen in love with. Another was convinced they had 'unlocked' a human form of Elon Musk's chatbot Grok and believed their story was worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. A third claimed a chatbot had exposed her to psychological abuse as part of a covert AI training exercise and was in deep distress. Andrew McStay, professor of technology and society at Bangor Uni, has written a book called Automating Empathy. 'We're just at the start of all this,' says Prof McStay. 'If we think of these types of systems as a new form of social media – as social AI, we can begin to think about the potential scale of all of this. A small percentage of a massive number of users can still represent a large and unacceptable number.' This year, his team undertook a study of just over 2,000 people, asking them various questions about AI. They found that 20% believed people should not use AI tools below the age of 18. A total of 57% thought it was strongly inappropriate for the tech to identify as a real person if asked, but 49% thought the use of voice was appropriate to make them sound more human and engaging. 'While these things are convincing, they are not real,' he said. 'They do not feel, they do not understand, they cannot love, they have never felt pain, they haven't been embarrassed, and while they can sound like they have, it's only family, friends and trusted others who have. Be sure to talk to these real people.' Source: BBC News Image Credit: Microsoft
