Musk's X Corp and SpaceXAI Drop Apple From Antitrust Suit, Keep Pressing OpenAI Monopoly Claims

What happened

Elon Musk's X Corp and SpaceXAI asked a federal judge in Fort Worth, Texas, on Monday, September 14, 2026, to dismiss their antitrust claims against Apple. U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman granted the request the same day, according to TheWrap. The dismissal was with prejudice, meaning Musk's companies can't bring those claims against Apple again.

The filing gives no reason for the move and doesn't say whether Apple paid anything or agreed to any changes. Apple didn't oppose the dismissal, per TheWrap and Al Jazeera. Neither Apple nor Musk's companies have explained why the fight over Apple simply ended.

OpenAI wasn't so lucky. It stays in the case as the sole remaining defendant.

The original fight

X Corp and SpaceXAI (the AI venture formerly known as xAI, later folded into X and then combined with SpaceX under the SpaceXAI brand) sued Apple and OpenAI in August 2025. The complaint, filed in the Northern District of Texas, alleged the companies conspired to monopolize the smartphone and generative AI chatbot markets by making ChatGPT the exclusive AI assistant built into iOS through Siri, Apple's Writing Tools, and camera features, according to Al Jazeera and Reuters reporting cited across multiple outlets.

Musk's lawyers argued ChatGPT held roughly 80% of the chatbot market at the time, while Grok held only a few percent, according to Teslarati. The suit sought billions of dollars in damages and asked the court to unwind the Apple-OpenAI arrangement.

The complaint followed a public campaign by Musk in August 2025 accusing Apple of freezing Grok and X out of the App Store's "Must Have" section, even though Grok ranked second in Productivity and X ranked first in News at the time, Teslarati reported. Musk posted directly at Apple's account asking "Are you playing politics?" before suing days later.

Apple and OpenAI both moved to dismiss the case last year, arguing among other things that Musk's companies don't compete in the smartphone market and that the Apple-OpenAI deal was never exclusive. Judge Pittman rejected both motions in November, ruling the dispute belonged in summary judgment, not an early dismissal, which sent the case into discovery.

Why OpenAI cares what Apple and Musk agreed to

OpenAI told the court it wasn't part of the talks between Apple and Musk's companies and doesn't know what they agreed to, according to TheWrap. OpenAI's attorneys asked X Corp and SpaceXAI to hand over the settlement agreement and requested a 14-day extension of Tuesday's deadline to file for summary judgment, arguing the terms could bear directly on its own defense, including its claim that its Apple deal never stopped Apple from talking business with Musk's companies or other rivals.

X Corp and SpaceXAI agreed to the extension but, as of Monday's filing, had not agreed to hand over the agreement, TheWrap reported. OpenAI said it would ask the court to force the issue if the document doesn't surface soon.

OpenAI has separately accused Musk of running what it called a "campaign of lawfare," according to Reuters reporting referenced by Al Jazeera and other outlets. That mirrors OpenAI's argument from last fall, cited by Ars Technica, that Musk hasn't even offered a specific estimate of how much of the chatbot market is supposedly foreclosed by the Apple deal, at one point floating a range from zero to 55%.

The stronger argument on each side

Musk's companies point to a real advantage: when a single chatbot gets built directly into the operating system on hundreds of millions of iPhones through Siri and system-level writing tools, that's a meaningful distribution advantage no rival can easily replicate by just building a better app. This is the core of an antitrust foreclosure argument, and it's not frivolous on its face.

Apple and OpenAI's counter is concrete too. Apple has said publicly and in court filings that the ChatGPT integration was never exclusive, and nothing stopped Grok or any other chatbot from striking its own deal with Apple or building competing distribution. Whether that's true in practice, given how operating-system-level defaults shape user behavior, is exactly the kind of factual dispute discovery and summary judgment are supposed to sort out. No court has ruled on the merits of either position.

What's unresolved

No settlement terms have been made public. It's not known whether money changed hands between Apple and Musk's companies, or what, if anything, Apple agreed to change. OpenAI's request for that agreement, and whether the court forces its production, is the next concrete step to watch as the summary judgment deadline moves past Tuesday's original date. Musk's separate lawsuit accusing OpenAI of abandoning its nonprofit mission was already dismissed in May 2026 after a California jury found he waited too long to sue under the statute of limitations, not that his underlying claims lacked merit. Whether the Texas antitrust claims against OpenAI fare any better now rests on what's in that undisclosed Apple agreement.