A US court has denied X and xAI's request to compel OpenAI to disclose its source code in an antitrust lawsuit against Apple. The ruling, handed down by Federal Magistrate Judge Hal R. Ray Jr., was based on the finding that the requested information was irrelevant to the subject matter of the lawsuit and did not meet the proportionality principle for evidence gathering.
According to the 9to5MacThe lawsuit was filed by X and xAI last year following Elon Musk's August 2025 statement accusing Apple of integrating ChatGPT into iOS as preventing other AI apps from reaching the top of the App Store, which he argued was "a clear violation of antitrust law."
Following Apple and OpenAI's unsuccessful attempts to dismiss the lawsuit, the case entered the evidentiary stage, during which the parties exchanged documents. During this period, X and xAI filed numerous motions compelling the defendants to hand over large troves of documents. Simultaneously, the plaintiffs requested information from at least eight other foreign companies developing so-called super apps.
The court paid particular attention to one of the motions, in which X and xAI requested the mandatory acquisition of what the documents provisionally referred to as OpenAI's "source code." This request was motivated by a desire to refute OpenAI's claim that it was technically impossible to integrate the Grok AI model into Apple's Intelligence system. However, the court noted that the plaintiffs had made no attempt to gather the necessary evidence through less drastic methods and had not explained why access to proprietary code was the only way to verify technical limitations.
In its decision, the court explicitly stated that "OpenAI's source code is irrelevant to the asserted antitrust claims and is not within the scope of permissible discovery under Rule 26 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure." The court also emphasized that even if the code were potentially relevant (which was not established), its release would still be disproportionate to the needs of the case.
The court sharply criticized X and xAI's tactics, noting that the case had accumulated over 135 records in less than five months, primarily disputes over the disclosure of evidence, calling their actions overly aggressive. The court also rejected the plaintiffs' attempt to force OpenAI to a dilemma: either disclose its most sensitive proprietary asset or acknowledge the technical feasibility of integrating Grok into iOS. 9to5Mac notes that this is the second such refusal: a week earlier, the South Korean government rejected X and xAI's request for documents from the developer of the super app Kakao, deeming it excessive and disproportionate.
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Source: 3dnews.ru
