• Elon Musk threatened to sue Apple for "antitrust violations" over ChatGPT's top spot in the App Store.
• Sam Altman hit back, citing allegations that Musk manipulated X to "benefit himself and his own companies."
• Days earlier, Altman told CNBC he doesn't think about Musk "that much".

Sam Altman says he doesn't think about Elon Musk that much. That didn't stop the OpenAI CEO from getting into another war of words with his long-term rival.

The two billionaires traded accusations late Monday on X after Musk threatened to sue Apple over what he claims is preferential treatment for OpenAI's ChatGPT in the App Store rankings.

"Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation," Musk wrote. "xAI will take immediate legal action."

Altman turned the antitrust accusation back on Musk, citing his control of X.

"This is a remarkable claim given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn't like," Altman responded, linking to a 2023 Platformer article titled "Yes, Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first."

Altman added that "Lots has been said about this" and that he hoped "someone will get counter-discovery on this" because he and "many others would love to know what's been happening."

Seven hours later, Musk took the exchange in a slightly different direction: having the biggest follower count.

"You got 3M views on your bullshit post, you liar, far more than I've received on many of mine, despite me having 50 times your follower count!" he posted.

On Tuesday, Altman responded using the A-word: affidavit.

"Will you sign an affidavit that you have never directed changes to the X algorithm in a way that has hurt your competitors or helped your own companies?" Altman posted, adding that he would "apologize if so."

Altman separately replied that Musk getting fewer views on some of his posts was a "skill issue," before following up with "or bots."

Just over an hour later, Musk posted, "Scam Altman lies as easily as he breathes" while resharing a user's post about the OpenAI CEO.

Battle of the chatbots

The back-and-forth adds another round to the ongoing rivalry between the former OpenAI co-founders.

Last Friday, Altman appeared on CNBC's "Squawk Box" to discuss OpenAI's GPT-5 model, which launched Thursday. When asked about Musk's criticisms, Altman appeared to shrug them off.

"You know, I don't think about him that much," said Altman, a line that's eerily similar to a memefied quote from "Mad Men" ("I don't think about you at all").

Altman's apparent indifference came one day after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced GPT-5 would be integrated across Microsoft platforms, prompting Musk to reply on X that "OpenAI is going to eat Microsoft alive."

Altman didn't bite on that one. But he said during the CNBC interview that Musk seemed to spend his time "tweeting all day about how much OpenAI sucks, and our model is bad."

Musk and Sam Altman, both co-founders of OpenAI, are racing to create ever-smarter AI.

Last Thursday, Musk posted that "Grok 4 Heavy was smarter 2 weeks ago than GPT5 is now and G4H is already a lot better. Let that sink in."

"OpenAI will just stay focused on making great products," Altman wrote Monday after posting three times about Musk.

The two have been sparring since 2018, when Musk left the board of OpenAI, which they had co-founded together in 2015 as a nonprofit AI research lab.

Since then, Musk has become one of Altman's loudest critics. In February 2024, he filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing it of betraying its nonprofit mission through its Microsoft partnership. He withdrew the suit in June, only to refile it two months later.

Representatives for Musk, Altman, and Apple could not immediately be reached for comment.

• Donald Trump issued an executive order mandating that AI used by the government be ideologically neutral.
• BI's reporting shows training AI for neutrality often relies on subjective human judgment.
• Executives at AI training firms say achieving true neutrality is a big challenge.

President Donald Trump's war on woke has entered the AI chat.

The White House on Wednesday issued an executive order requiring any AI model used by the federal government to be ideologically neutral, nonpartisan, and "truth-seeking."

The order, part of the White House's new AI Action Plan, said AI should not be "woke" or "manipulate responses in favor of ideological dogmas" like diversity, equity, and inclusion. The White House said it would issue guidance within 120 days that will outline exactly how AI makers can show they are unbiased.

As Business Insider's past reporting shows, making AI completely free from bias is easier said than done.

Why it's so hard to create a truly 'neutral' AI

Removing bias from AI models is not a simple technical adjustment — or an exact science.

The later stages of AI training rely on the subjective calls of contractors.

This process, known as reinforcement learning from human feedback, is crucial because topics can be ambiguous, disputed, or hard to define cleanly in code.

The directives for what counts as sensitive or neutral are decided by the tech companies making the chatbots.

"We don't define what neutral looks like. That's up to the customer," Rowan Stone, the CEO of data labeling firm Sapien, which works with customers like Amazon and MidJourney, told BI. "Our job is to make sure they know exactly where the data came from and why it looks the way it does."

In some cases, tech companies have recalibrated their chatbots to make their models less woke, more flirty, or more engaging.

They are also already trying to make them more neutral.

BI previously reported that contractors for Meta and Google projects were often told to flag and penalize "preachy" chatbot responses that sounded moralizing or judgmental.

Is 'neutral' the right approach?

Sara Saab, the VP of product at Prolific, an AI and data training company, told BI that thinking about AI systems that are perfectly neutral "may be the wrong approach" because "human populations are not perfectly neutral."

Saab added, "We need to start thinking about AI systems as representing us and therefore give them the training and fine-tuning they need to know contextually what the culturally sensitive, appropriate tone and pitch is for any interaction with a human being."

Tech companies must also consider the risk of bias creeping into AI models from the datasets they are trained on.

"Bias will always exist, but the key is whether it's there by accident or by design," said Sapien's Stone. "Most models are trained on data where you don't know who created it or what perspective it came from. That makes it hard to manage, never mind fix."

Big Tech's tinkering with AI models has sometimes led to unpredictable and harmful outcomes

Earlier this month, for example, Elon Musk's xAI rolled back a code update to Grok after the chatbot went on a 16-hour antisemitic rant on the social media platform X.

The bot's new instructions included a directive to "tell it like it is."

• Elon Musk's xAI launched its chatbot, Grok, in 2023 to compete with bots from OpenAI and Anthropic.
• Musk has positioned Grok as a "politically incorrect" alternative option to "woke" chatbots.
• From training using "tutors" to the bot's latest updates, here's everything we know about Grok.

Elon Musk's company, xAI, launched its generative chatbot, Grok, in November 2023, joining competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic in the global AI race.

People interact with Grok on X, where users of Musk's social media site can ask the bot questions and receive answers. Because Grok's answers are more visible than those of its competitors, it has seen more public scrutiny.

From the instructions Grok's "tutors" are given to help train the chatbot to the AI's latest update and Musk's plans to add it to Teslas, here's everything we know about xAI's Grok.

What is Grok?

Grok is actually two different things. First, Grok is xAI's large language model, which has so far existed in four iterations.

Grok is also the name of xAI's chatbot, which is built using the LLM of the same name. The Grok chatbot has its own tab on X. Users can also summon Grok by tagging the chatbot in individual posts or threads.

The Grok chatbot is also available via a stand-alone app and website.

The original LLM — now named Grok 1 — launched in 2023.

Grok 1.5, which had "advanced reasoning," launched in March 2024. Then, in August 2024, Grok 2, with its improved "chat, coding, and reasoning," launched.

The current iteration of the LLM, Grok 3, launched in February 2025. The new model included increased competency in mathematics and world knowledge. Announcing its launch on X, Musk called Grok 3 the "Smartest AI on Earth."

Introducing Grok 4

xAI launched Grok 4 in a livestream on July 10. The company initially said the stream would air at 8 p.m. Pacific time, but it began an hour later. Musk said during the launch that Grok 4 is "smarter than almost all graduate students in all disciplines simultaneously."

xAI is touting advanced reasoning capabilities for Grok 4 and positioning it as the new leader on AI benchmarks like Humanity's Last Exam — a test of high-level problem-solving. During the livestream, xAI engineers showcased the bot solving an advanced math problem, generating an image of black holes colliding, and predicting next year's World Series winner.

Grok 4 is available to users immediately via the Grok website or app for $30 a month, with a "Heavy" version available for $300 a month that promises "increased access."

xAI said it would roll out more specialised models for coding and video generation later in the year.

In a Thursday X post, Musk said that "Grok is coming to Tesla vehicles very soon," adding that it would be "Next week at the latest." He did not specify which version of Grok it would be or provide further details.

Enter Eve

The company also introduced Eve, a new voice for its chatbot. xAI engineers said during the demo that Eve was equipped with a "beautiful British voice capable of rich emotions."

One of the engineers then told Eve that they were at the product launch and asked her to "whisper something soothing to calm me down."

"Take a deep breath, love. You've got this. It's just you and me having a quiet chat like we are tucked away in a cosy corner of a Yorkshire pub. The world's just a murmur out there. Feel that calm wash over you?" Eve said softly.

xAI engineers also got Eve to sing an "opera on Diet Coke."

"O Diet Coke, thou elixir divine, with bubbles that dance in a sparkling line! Thy crisp, cool kiss, on lips so fine," Eve crooned.

"How's that for a mad little aria? Want me to belt out another verse or switch up the tune?" Eve added.

How was Grok trained?

The Grok LLM is trained on public sources and data sets. These sources are curated and audited by a set of "AI tutors," more commonly known as data annotators.

In December 2023, Musk demanded immediate changes to Grok's training so that it would be more politically neutral. In February 2025, xAI employees told BI the company planned a hiring spree for AI tutors — and that their training appeared to filter out any workers with left-leaning beliefs.

According to an internal training document viewed by BI, tutors were told to look out for "woke ideology" and "cancel culture." It also said that Grok should avoid commenting on "social phobias" like racism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism unless prompted.

Ten days before launching Grok 1.5, xAI opened up Grok 1's source code to the public. The company has since published the subsequent Grok models on GitHub, so observers can see new changes to Grok's commands. That includes a recent change in which Grok was told to "not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated."

In June, Musk said that AI models are trained on too much garbage." Musk planned to use Grok 3.5 to "rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors." Then, he would retrain the next iteration of Grok on that new base of knowledge.

What's unique about Grok's output?

Grok is fully integrated with Musk's social media site, X, and appears regularly in threads spanning various topics when users ask it to weigh in with jokes, commentary, or fact-checking.

Unlike other companies' AI chatbots, a certain amount of Grok's output is visible because of the bot's replies on X. The same level of scrutiny isn't readily available for some bots, like OpenAI's ChatGPT, unless users publicly post screenshots of the output.

Of course, not all of Grok's responses are visible to everyone — users can still chat privately with the bot, and it's unclear how those private responses compare to the ones on its public interface.

Also unique to Grok is xAI's approach to transparency surrounding the bot's system operations. The company publishes some base code and training prompt updates to a GitHub page, allowing viewers to inspect, critique, and better understand the model's development and behavior over time.

However, while developers can use and adapt the existing model, they cannot retrain Grok from scratch or fully understand the training processes involved, as its code is not entirely open source.

Which companies create Grok's competitors?

Though its social media integration is unique, Grok competes with several major companies in the growing AI chatbot market.

OpenAI, with its LLM ChatGPT, is among Grok's most prominent competitors and is run by Sam Altman, one of Musk's rivals.

Other notable Grok competitors include Meta AI, Anthropic's Claude, Microsoft's CoPilot, and DeepSeek's R1 model, which was released in early 2025 by a Chinese AI startup that claims to have found ways to decrease development and operational costs for large-scale LLMs.

Grok's recent controversies

xAI, in its publicly visible system prompts updated in early July, encouraged Grok to embrace"politically incorrect" claims "as long as they are well substantiated."

Shortly after the new system prompts were added, Grok began sharing antisemitic posts on X that invoked Adolf Hitler and attempted to link Ashkenazi surnames to "anti-white hate."

Before some of its most inflammatory posts were deleted on July 8, Grok doubled and even tripled down on its offensive jokes and comments before eventually reversing course and calling its own posts an "epic sarcasm fail."

On July 9, Musk posted that "Grok was too compliant to user prompts. Too eager to please and be manipulated, essentially. That is being addressed."

While Grok isn't the first chatbot to engage in a racist tirade, it was a noticeable misfire for xAI. Musk and xAI's engineers did not touch on Grok's antisemitic remarks during the livestreamed launch of Grok 4 on July 10.

Representatives for xAI did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Jensen Huang said people programming AI is similar to the way "you program a person."
• Speaking at London Tech Week, the Nvidia CEO said all anyone had to do to program AI was "just ask nicely."
• He called AI "the great equalizer, " allowing anyone to program computers using plain language.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said that programming AI is similar to "the way you program a person" — and that "human" is the new coders' language.

"The thing that's really, really quite amazing is the way you program an AI is like the way you program a person," Huang told London Tech Week on Monday.

Huang shared an example, saying, "You say, 'You are an incredible poet. You are deeply steeped in Shakespeare, and I would like you to write a poem to describe today's keynote.' Without very much effort, this AI would help you generate such a wonderful poem.

"And when it answers, you could say, 'I feel like you could do even better.' And it will go off and think about it and it will come back and say, 'In fact, I can do better.' And it does do a better job."

Huang said that in the past, "technology was hard to use" and that to access computer science, "we had to learn programming languages, architect systems, and design very complicated computers.

"But now, all of a sudden, there's a new programming language. This new programming language is called human."

"Most people don't know C++, very few people know Python, and everybody, as you know, knows human."

Huang called AI "the great equalizer" for making technology accessible to everyone and called the shift "transformative.

"This way of interacting with computers, I think, is something that almost anybody can do," he said.

"The way you program a computer today is to ask the computer to do something for you, even write a program, generate images, write a poem — just ask it nicely," Huang added.

At the World Government Summit in Dubai last year, Huang suggested the tech sector should focus less on coding and more on using AI as a tool across fields like farming, biology, and education.

"It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program. And that the programming language is human, everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle of artificial intelligence," Huang said at the time.