Musk warns that he will ban Apple devices at his companies if OpenAI is integrated into iOS

Billionaire Elon Musk said on Monday he would ban Apple devices at his companies if the iPhone maker integrates OpenAI at the operating system level.

“That is an unacceptable security violation,” Musk, who is the CEO of electric-vehicle maker Tesla and rocket maker SpaceX and owner of social media company X, said in a post on X.

“And visitors will have to check their Apple devices at the door, where they will be stored in a Faraday cage,” he said.

Apple and OpenAI did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comments.

Earlier in the day, Apple announced a slew of AI features across its apps and operating platforms and a partnership with OpenAI to bring the ChatGPT technology to its devices.

Apple said it had built AI with privacy “at the core” and it would use a combination of on-device processing and cloud computing to power those features.

“It’s patently absurd that Apple isn’t smart enough to make their own AI, yet is somehow capable of ensuring that OpenAI will protect your security & privacy!” Musk said on X.

At the beginning of March, Musk had sued OpenAI, which he co-founded in 2015, and its CEO Sam Altman, saying they abandoned the startup’s original mission to develop AI for the benefit of humanity and not for profit.

Musk has also founded his own startup, xAI, in a bid to challenge OpenAI and build an alternative to the viral chatbot ChatGPT.

xAI was valued at US$24 billion in its last funding round, where it raised US$6 billion in series B funding.

(Reporting by Zaheer Kachwala in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)