Elon Musk had previously taken Apple and OpenAI to court over the ranking issues of his AI assistant Grok on the Apple App Store. However, he did not expect that this lawsuit would now target his core business empire. Recently, U.S. federal district judge Mark Pitman ruled to formally reject the objections from xAI and the X platform, upholding the previous court ruling: Musk must submit relevant emails from his Tesla and SpaceX accounts as evidence in this case.
This lawsuit originated from Musk's dissatisfaction with Apple. He claimed that Grok's poor ranking was due to anti-competitive "backdoor collusion" between Apple and OpenAI. The two companies had reached a deep collaboration, with ChatGPT providing the underlying technology for Apple's Apple Intelligence and some new versions of Siri. During an earlier hearing presided over by Judge Hal R. Cogburn, the court made several key rulings, including naming Apple executive Craig Federighi as a custodian of evidence and requiring Apple to submit recent cooperation documents with Google regarding the Gemini large model.
However, what truly triggered a strong reaction from Musk's team was the court adopting OpenAI's argument, requiring the retrieval of emails related to Musk's communications in Tesla and SpaceX official email accounts. Although the legal teams of X and xAI argued that these two companies were independent entities and not under their control, this argument was immediately rejected by the judge.
In his final ruling, Judge Pitman stated that there were clear clues in the case file indicating that Musk often handled business affairs across different companies. A typical example is that the CFO of xAI had directly sent the company's financial reports to Musk's SpaceX business email. Based on this, the court concluded that given Musk's controlling stake and top decision-making role in multiple companies, it was common for him to use other companies' email accounts to handle business matters for the X platform and xAI. The judge emphasized that once executives used email accounts across companies for business purposes, the content of those emails automatically entered the scope of discoverable evidence, and ownership of the email account could not serve as a shield.
Currently, the court has not set a final deadline for submitting the emails. The defense lawyers of X and xAI previously stated that although sorting and organizing these complex cross-company emails would take considerable time, they would cooperate with the court as quickly as possible. This battle among tech giants sparked by AI rankings is becoming increasingly complicated due to the expansion of the core evidence chain.
