Elon Musk filed to have Apple dismissed from the lawsuit he brought against it and OpenAI, and OpenAI demanded answers. The judge has denied OpenAI’s request to reveal settlement terms.
When Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI sought to dismiss Apple from the ongoing lawsuit brought against it and OpenAI, it wasn’t clear exactly what had transpired. In OpenAI’s efforts to find out, it has been revealed that there was some kind of settlement reached between the companies.
OpenAI asked that the settlement terms be revealed, but after Judge Pittman reviewed the settlement, he denied the request. The decision was first shared by 9to5Mac, which said that if the settlement terms were relevant to the ongoing case with OpenAI, they could be shared, but they apparently are not.
Here is what he said in the filing:
The Court hesitates to compel the production of confidential settlement agreements entered by parties. Confidentiality in settlement serves the “[s]trong federal policy” of “induc[ing] the parties to settle a case.”
In other words, if Apple and SpaceXAI want to settle out of court, it is not only their business to do so, but to do so confidentially. To make such agreements public could jeopardize such agreements from ever taking place.
An odd lawsuit either way
The origins of xAI’s, now SpaceXAI’s, lawsuit against Apple can be tied to a tirade by owner Elon Musk. He made claims that the App Store was favoring OpenAI’s ChatGPT over Grok and Apple was biased against X.
He claimed that Apple was manipulating App Store charts to keep Grok and X from ranking higher, keeping ChatGPT at the top. The problem is, all of these claims were easily proven incorrect.
By the time the lawsuit came about, the accusations were shrunk to much more manageable proportions. Musk focused on Grok and accused Apple and OpenAI of anticompetitive collusion.
Whatever agreement or settlement Apple and Musk came to, it is unlikely that OpenAI can escape as easily. Elon Musk is known to have a very strong rivalry with his former business partner Sam Altman, the current CEO of OpenAI.
It will be interesting to see exactly what the lawsuit reveals, especially as Grok and X continue to face problems surrounding non-consensual deepfake pornography and CSAM distribution on the platforms. However, it is no longer Apple’s problem as it steps away to focus on its own lawsuit with OpenAI.
