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Legal warfare between AI rivals just got messier. OpenAI has filed fresh allegations accusing Elon Musk’s xAI of deliberately using ephemeral messaging apps to scrub evidence from a high-stakes antitrust dispute.
The charge appears inside a discovery fight tied to Musk’s counterclaims last year, when xAI sued OpenAI arguing its partnership with Apple blocked Grok from reaching the top spot on the App Store. Musk has long bristled at ChatGPT’s deeper integration into iOS 18. Now OpenAI says the discovery process has been tainted by deletion of potentially relevant communications.
OpenAI says xAI employees used apps with auto-delete features to erase messages and failed to produce non-public documents, emails, or platform messages that are material to OpenAI’s defense.
Bloomberg first reported the filings. According to OpenAI, employees at xAI leveraged temporary messaging tools — platforms designed to forget — to remove threads that could illuminate the companies’ interactions and competitive conduct. The accusation is blunt: the tactic was intended to destroy evidence and leave OpenAI and other parties disadvantaged in the litigation.
OpenAI is asking the court for two immediate remedies. First: an order prohibiting xAI personnel from using self-deleting messaging services while the case proceeds. Second: appointment of an independent special master, a neutral investigator, to comb through devices and attempt recovery of any deleted material. Those moves are aimed at preserving the integrity of discovery and deterring further washout of records.
For its part, xAI previously tried — and failed — to compel access to OpenAI’s source code and to subpoena Jan Leike, the former head of alignment at OpenAI. The presiding judge rejected those requests, finding the source code irrelevant to xAI’s claims and the demands broadly beyond what the dispute reasonably requires. That ruling complicates xAI’s strategy but doesn’t end the spat.
The dispute exposes a modern paradox: privacy-minded tools built to protect users can also be weaponized to obscure accountability. What happens when platforms designed to make messages disappear collide with courts that demand paper trails? Expect privacy, discovery rules, and litigation norms to collide in new ways as AI companies litigate market access and platform partnerships.
As both sides circle, the underlying questions remain: how broadly should courts police ephemeral communications, and what standards will govern digital evidence in competitive fights between AI titans?
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