Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, has been added as a document custodian in xAI’s antitrust lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI. Here’s what that means.
Last year, Elon Musk accused Apple and OpenAI of working together to prevent competing LLMs from succeeding in the App Store, sparking a lawsuit that now also involves the super app market.
In the lawsuit, xAI (which is now part of SpaceX) claims that Apple’s deal with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into Siri has been influencing App Store rankings.
Apple has repeatedly denied these accusations, taking particular issue with xAI’s characterization that the company’s deal with OpenAI involves exclusivity, which it does not.
Over the past few months, xAI has tried to broaden discovery in the lawsuit, including by seeking documents from foreign companies under the Hague Convention.
While the US court has granted these requests, they haven’t been as successful abroad. In January, South Korea rejected its bid to obtain documents from Kakao, the company behind one of the country’s major super apps. Similar requests are pending in other countries.
This week, the case’s discovery got broadened once again when the court granted xAI’s request to add Craig Federighi as a custodian but denied the same request for Tim Cook:
Here, Plaintiffs argue both Cook and Federighi “made high-level, strategic decisions about the Apple-OpenAI Agreement.” Plaintiffs have sufficiently met this standard as to Federighi. They argue that Federighi may have unique relevant evidence not already produced relating to Apple’s integration of OpenAI into Apple Intelligence, because as Senior Vice President of Software Engineering he likely was a key decision maker regarding Apple’s software development. However, Plaintiffs have not made this showing as to Cook. Plaintiffs do not explain how Cook is likely to have any unique relevant evidence that was not already produced, or that designating Federighi as a custodian would not provide. Accordingly, the Court GRANTS in part Plaintiffs request, and designates Craig Federighi as a custodian. Apple shall provide responsive discoverable documents in Federighi’s possession by June 17, 2026.
The court also denied xAI’s request to add another unnamed Apple employee to the case, who would have provided information regarding iPhone sales. In its decision, US Magistrate Judge Hal R. Ray, Jr. said that “[D]ocuments regarding competition in the smartphone industry writ large far exceed the scope of the claims in this case.”
Additionally, the court granted xAI’s motion to request documents from Apple’s partnership with Google, although it reduced the scope of the initial request:
This request is overly broad and encompasses information that goes beyond the scope of material relevant to OpenAI’s defense. However, the Court finds that related documents that refer to potential exclusivity clauses of the artificial intelligence provider for Apple products are relevant and proportional to the needs of this case. Therefore, the Court GRANTS the Motion in part as to this point, and ORDERS Apple to produce such category of documents by June 17, 2026.
OpenAI, in turn, also had a small victory, with the court granting its request to compel Elon Musk to hand over “emails at both Tesla and SpaceX, and his other text and XChat accounts,” which must be produced by June 3, 2026.
Finally, the court denied xAI’s request to have Apple hand over information on how AI is being used internally, stating that “it is unclear how Apple’s internal policies for its employees regarding artificial intelligence are related to Plaintiffs’ antitrust claims.”
You can read the court’s full decision below:
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