The gatekeeper walks, the model maker stays

An antitrust conspiracy claim needs two conspirators. On Monday one of them was excused, and the case carried on against the other.

X Corp and xAI asked a federal judge in Fort Worth to approve the voluntary dismissal of Apple from the lawsuit they filed against it in August 2025. Bloomberg reported the filing, which resolves the Apple portion of the case and leaves the claims against OpenAI in place. No terms were disclosed, and representatives for the four companies did not respond to requests for comment.

The case is X Corp. v. Apple Inc., No. 4:25-cv-00914, in the Northern District of Texas, before Judge Mark T. Pittman. It was filed on 25 August 2025 and alleged that Apple and OpenAI had conspired to monopolise the markets for smartphones and generative AI chatbots — that ChatGPT's integration into Apple Intelligence was exclusive by design, and that App Store rankings were arranged to keep rivals, Grok among them, out of reach. The complaint called the arrangement "two monopolists joining forces to ensure their continued dominance", and asked for billions in damages and for the partnership to be undone.

It was not a weak filing. In November 2025, Judge Pittman denied both defendants' motions to dismiss, which meant the pleading was good enough to put Apple and OpenAI into discovery rather than out of the courthouse. That is the stage most antitrust complaints against large platforms do not reach.

Which makes the shape of Monday's filing the thing worth reading. The party released is the one that owns the surface. Apple decides what an iPhone does out of the box, what the assistant defaults to and where an app sits in a search result. That control was not incidental to the theory of harm; it was the theory of harm. Without a device maker in the case, what remains is a claim against a model vendor for having accepted a deal that somebody else was in a position to offer.

A conspiracy count can survive one defendant leaving — dismissals are routine, and the remaining party can be held to the whole agreement. But the remedy changes. The relief that would have mattered here was structural and it sat on Apple's side: unwind the integration, stop ranking the App Store in a way that favours the partner. None of that can be ordered against OpenAI, which cannot change a default it does not set.

There is also the matter of who is now suing. Both plaintiffs are subsidiaries of SpaceX, which acquired xAI in February in an all-stock deal valuing the combined company at $1.25 trillion. The entity arguing that two large firms should not be allowed to combine distribution and models is itself the product of the largest merger on record, and it is preparing to go public.

That is not a legal argument against the claim. Antitrust does not require clean hands, and a plaintiff's own size has no bearing on whether a defendant's conduct was unlawful. It does bear on what a court will want to hear about market definition, because a company of that scale describing itself as foreclosed has a harder time explaining what it was foreclosed from.

The unanswered question is money. A voluntary dismissal with nothing on the record is consistent with a settlement, with a commercial arrangement reached elsewhere, or with a plaintiff deciding that one front was enough. The docket will not say, and nobody involved is saying either.

What the filing does establish is that the most testable competition question in consumer AI — whether the assistant a phone ships with is a market or a feature — will not be answered in this case. It was the question Apple was in the room to answer, and Apple has left the room.