During the WWDC keynote on Monday, Apple recently announced its partnership with OpenAI, but Tesla boss Elon Musk didn’t seem impressed with the collaboration. He dropped a bomb on X (formerly Twitter), saying he would ban Apple devices at his companies if Apple integrated OpenAI at the operating system level. According to Elon Musk, “That is an unacceptable security violation.”
Interestingly, Elon Musk owns a bunch of companies including Tesla, X, SpaceX, xAI, and more. Therefore, such a response comes as a threat whether the employees working at these companies could bring Apple devices — iPhones, iPads, or Macs — into the office premises or not.
Elon Musk didn’t stop and kept taking digs at this Apple-OpenAI partnership. In another post, “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!” he wrote. He added, “Apple has no clue what’s actually going on once they hand your data over to OpenAI. They’re selling you down the river.
There’s Always a Back Story
What’s important to note is Elon Musk has quite a history with OpenAI whose deal with Apple he took potshots on. Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but stepped away from it in 2018. Then, in March of this year, he sued the company and its CEO Sam Altman, claiming they had moved away from the startup’s initial goal of developing AI in favor of making money. But that’s just another story.
Apple has finally entered the AI era with Almost…err Apple Intelligence. And the latest batch of developer beta updates of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS 15 Sequoia, and more are finally here. While Musk claims there may be potential data-related risks, Apple clarifies that “Private Cloud Compute uses your data only to fulfill your request and never stores it.”