X’s Community Notes Debunks Musk’s Claims of Apple’s App Store Bias
In an ironic turn of events, his platform, X, called out Elon Musk in a show of irony, by correcting his assertion that Apple was discriminating against OpenAI in favor of ChatGPT, using its Community Notes feature. On August 12, 2025, Musk stated that Apple committed an enforcement antitrust violation as it was impossible to make an AI app other than ChatGPT attain the number one position in the App Store. Community Notes quickly replied to that allegation, saying they had recorded that DeepSeek and Perplexity apps were most popular in 2025, after Apple had partnered with OpenAI in June 2024. This was a public correction and set against an eye-opening back-and-forth with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that capture the complications of platform fairness and the growing part of crowd-sourced fact-checking in tech controversies. To the technologically-savvy audience in India, this story brings to fore important questions of digital equity, and AI competition.
The claims by Musk were based on his disappointment that Grok, with great downloads, remained in the fifth position as ChatGPT occupied the first position. He also voiced concerns over why Apple was excluding Grok and X in its Must Have list and he had threatened to use the legal system. The X feature Community Notes, which Musk championed as part of an effort to fight misinformation on X, also rebuked the assertion, citing that DeepSeek reached #1 in January 2025 and Perplexity headed the Indian App Store on July 18, 2025. The Grok itself became the number one ranked app in February 2025 according to the Tower data, refuting the systemic bias claims of Musk. Apple hit back, underlining the fairness of the App Store, which runs on objective measures such as active user levels, and professional curation, the BBC reports.
The conflict intensified after Altman labeled the claims of Musk as “remarkable” and argues the X algorithm is manipulated by the businessman to maximize his interests and damage his rivals. Musk responded, accusing Altman of lying, and that Altman has 3 million views on his post compared to his much greater following (224 million) of which. The acerbic Altman response and daring to Musk to sign an affidavit confirming he did not tamper with X algorithm have cultivated the disagreement. The back-and-forth can be traced to the rivalry that between the two has persisted since co-founding OpenAI in 2015. The media coverage of the exit in 2018 by Musk, having been unable to shift OpenAI to a for-profit operation, resulted in lawsuits, and in 2023, xAI was formed in opposition to OpenAI.
This fight is relevant in India, which ranks third in the world in the number of X users 22 million and where the market potential of AI has been estimated at 17 billion by 2027, according to the Statista agency. Local artificial intelligence startups such as Krutrim and Sarvam AI have to operate in a worldwide landscape whereby platform visibility is essential. Those allegations by Musk, assuming they are accurate, would raise issues relating to market access just as India is investigating monopolistic acts in technology. On the other hand, corrections posted by Community Notes serve as a reminder of the strong community-sourced accountability that is increasingly becoming popular among Indian netizens as they believe in such open discussion. The fact that the feature can fact check an owner of such a platform, such as Musk, is evidence of its objectivity, fitting India with its philosophy of digital trust, as with its MeitY guidelines on misinformation.
This episode also begs the questions of the default implements of AI, similar to the ChatGPT integration into Siri, that provides OpenAI with a glimpse onto the landscape of millions of devices. Equivalent implementations, like Google’s move to Gemini on Android, start fragmenting consumers to lock them in. A 2023 Pew Research study observes that social media algorithms tend to favor accounts with a big follower base, which makes it challenging to accept Musk accusations of unfair treatment. To Indian developers, this explains why neutral grounds should be promoted in order to develop innovation. It seems that Apple is already a target of antitrust investigations in the U.S. and Europe, with a recent lawsuit brought by Epic Games in 2020, so the legal threat issued by Musk could become a success, which may also shape the regulatory practice in India.
The Community Notes correction acts as a special bonus: even tech giants cannot rule out the weapon of their power. Musk wanted X to be a truth-seeking platform and his intentions backfired as his assertions came to face judgment. In the ongoing feud between the two, OpenAI filed their April 2025 countersuit claiming that Musk had waged a campaign to undermine them, highlighting an aspect of how much is at stake in the AI race. To the tech community in India, it serves as a plexus to remember to always be driven by facts and not rhetoric when trying to survive the digital age, where platforms determine what narratives to create and innovation impinging.
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