Texas Judge Orders Musk's X, SpaceXAI to Unseal Apple Deal

On Monday, Elon Musk's companies quietly settled their antitrust case against Apple. By Tuesday, a federal judge in Texas had ordered them to show the world exactly what the settlement says.

U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, sitting in Fort Worth, ruled on September 15 that X Corp and SpaceXAI must file with the court by Thursday, September 17, "any agreement or combination of agreements with Apple that relate to the resolution of Plaintiffs' claims against Apple in this litigation," Reuters reported.

"Any agreement or combination of agreements with Apple that relate to the resolution of Plaintiffs' claims against Apple in this litigation." — Judge Mark Pittman's order, Sept. 15

The order came after OpenAI — still a defendant alongside the now-settled Apple — demanded access to the secret deal, arguing it needs the terms to defend itself against Musk's remaining claims.

It is a rare legal moment: a company that just won a settlement may be forced to hand the details to the very rival that settlement was supposed to leave in the fight alone.

Sept. 17 status: did the filing happen?

Update, Sept. 17: as of Thursday evening, no public filing of the Apple agreement had surfaced on the Fort Worth docket or in reporting. Pittman's order required X and SpaceXAI to file the agreement with the court today and to respond to OpenAI's demands — watch whether the companies sought to file under seal, as a protective-order fight over public disclosure is almost certain.

Aerial view of Apple Park, Apple's Cupertino headquarters. Apple settled its portion of Musk's antitrust lawsuit this week; a Texas judge has now ordered Musk's companies to disclose the terms. Photo: Daniel L. Lu, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The ruling: a 48-hour clock on a sealed deal

Pittman's order is surgical. X and SpaceXAI must produce the actual settlement document to the court — and must separately respond to OpenAI's demands by Thursday. The ChatGPT maker's lawyers at Wachtell asked the judge on Tuesday to compel disclosure after Musk's companies agreed to one thing — a 14-day extension of OpenAI's deadline to file for summary judgment — while refusing to share the agreement itself.

OpenAI told the court it was not involved in the discussions between Apple and Musk's companies and does not know what the agreement contains. In its Tuesday filing, OpenAI argued the terms could significantly affect its defenses, including its contention that its deal with Apple never prevented Apple from holding business discussions with Musk's companies or other competitors. It added that whatever X agreed to with Apple could undermine any effort by Musk's companies to extract a monetary payment from OpenAI down the road.

Neither Apple nor OpenAI has admitted wrongdoing at any point in the case. Apple has maintained all along that its OpenAI arrangement was never exclusive.

Why the document matters: the exclusivity question

To understand why OpenAI is fighting so hard for a piece of paper it was never party to, rewind to August 2025, when Musk's X Corp and xAI — the AI company that became SpaceXAI after SpaceX acquired it in February 2026 — sued Apple and OpenAI in the Northern District of Texas.

The complaint accused Apple of violating antitrust law by exclusively integrating ChatGPT into Apple Intelligence features on iPhones and other devices. Musk's companies argued the partnership entrenched OpenAI's dominance in generative AI while locking out rivals — including Grok, the chatbot then being developed by xAI. The suit also alleged that Apple reinforced the alleged exclusivity by featuring ChatGPT on its "Must-Have Apps" list while sidelining competing apps in the App Store. Bloomberg Law reported the lawsuit sought billions of dollars in damages.

Both defendants tried to kill the case. In November 2025, Pittman refused to dismiss it, allowing Musk's companies to proceed for now — though he cautioned the ruling was no judgment on the merits. OpenAI, for its part, called the suit "consistent with Mr Musk's ongoing pattern of harassment," while Apple told the court, "Choosing one partner first is not unlawful." OpenAI separately accused Musk of waging "a campaign of lawfare" against the company and ChatGPT.

Discovery then turned brutal. In June, Pittman affirmed an order by Magistrate Judge Hal R. Ray Jr. requiring Musk to turn over emails from his Tesla and SpaceX accounts, after OpenAI argued Musk used those accounts to conduct xAI business — a claim bolstered, OpenAI said, by the fact that xAI's own CFO had emailed Musk about xAI business at his SpaceX address.

Elon Musk in 2015 — the year he co-founded OpenAI. His companies X Corp and SpaceXAI brought the Texas antitrust case and settled with Apple this week, while keeping their claims against OpenAI alive. Photo via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 (originally posted to Flickr).

Monday's vanishing defendant

That is the backdrop against which Monday's settlement landed. On September 14, X and SpaceXAI asked the court to dismiss their claims against Apple with prejudice — meaning permanently, never to be refiled — while explicitly keeping every claim against OpenAI and its entities intact. Apple's lawyers did not oppose. Pittman granted the motion the same day.

"Plaintiffs have resolved their claims in this Action against Defendant Apple Inc.," the filing stated, without disclosing a dollar figure, an apology, or a single term.

The resolution raised an immediate, uncomfortable question for OpenAI: what did Apple give, promise, or concede to make Musk walk away — and does any of it undercut the theories OpenAI is relying on to survive the rest of the case? If Apple, for instance, acknowledged anything about the competitive effects of its AI partnerships, OpenAI's own "we were never exclusive" defense gets harder. If the deal included payments or commitments, the damages math changes. OpenAI's lawyers want to find out before they file for summary judgment.

The other Musk-versus-OpenAI war, settled in May

OpenAI's anxiety is understandable, because it has only recently stopped bleeding in Musk-related litigation. In May 2026, a federal jury in Oakland unanimously rejected Musk's separate lawsuit accusing OpenAI, Sam Altman, and its leadership of abandoning the company's nonprofit mission after he donated $38 million in its early years. The verdict, delivered after a three-week trial, turned on the statute of limitations: jurors concluded Musk had simply waited too long to sue, deliberating less than two hours.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted the jury's advisory verdict as the court's own, dismissing Musk's claims outright. Musk's related claims against Microsoft — accused of aiding and abetting OpenAI's transition — were dismissed as a matter of law. Musk posted on X that he would appeal to the Ninth Circuit. His legal team had estimated the alleged wrongful gains at between $78.8 billion and $135 billion. Gonzalez Rogers was unmoved: "There's a substantial amount of evidence to support the jury's finding, which is why I was prepared to dismiss on the spot," she said in court, according to Reuters.

And Apple is separately suing OpenAI

If the Texas case is a triangle, the broader Apple–OpenAI relationship has become a full-blown multi-front war. On July 10, 2026, Apple sued OpenAI in the Northern District of California, accusing it of systematically stealing trade secrets to accelerate its push into consumer hardware.

The complaint named OpenAI's chief hardware officer Tang Tan — a 24-year Apple veteran who most recently served as vice president of product design for the iPhone and Apple Watch — and member of technical staff Chang Liu, who joined OpenAI in January 2026. Apple alleged Tan used confidential project code names during recruiting, directed job candidates still at Apple to bring "actual parts" to interviews for "show and tell," and coached departing engineers on evading Apple's security procedures; Liu, Apple claimed, never returned his company laptop and conspired with an Apple employee to pull confidential documents from Apple's network. Apple said it had warned OpenAI of its findings in February and received no response. The suit also named io Products — the hardware startup founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive that OpenAI acquired last year — though it did not name Ive himself or accuse him of wrongdoing. Apple's lawyers claimed more than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI.

OpenAI's response was flat: "We have no interest in other companies' trade secrets. We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere." In August, it asked a judge to dismiss the suit, arguing it is "building something entirely new and different from anything at Apple" and that Apple had failed to describe any protectable trade secret. As the Wall Street Journal noted, the relationship has deteriorated sharply since 2024, when the two companies signed their ChatGPT-for-Siri deal — and Apple has since turned to Google, with its new Siri AI announced in June reportedly powered by Gemini technology.

What happens before Thursday

The immediate calendar is tight. By Thursday, September 17, Musk's companies must put the Apple agreement on the court's record and answer OpenAI's demands. OpenAI's summary-judgment motion — now due later thanks to the agreed 14-day extension — will be the next real test of whether Musk's remaining antitrust claims can survive without Apple in the case.

Watch for three things. First, whether X and SpaceXAI ask for the filing to be sealed — Pittman's order says to file the agreement with the court, but a protective-order fight over public disclosure is almost certain. Second, whether any dollar figure leaks: Musk's original suit sought billions, and the size of the settlement will signal how much of that Apple took seriously. Third, how OpenAI uses the document in its summary-judgment papers — the company has essentially promised the court that the terms cut against Musk's case.

Why the secrecy itself is the story

Strip away the parties, and this is a familiar pattern in American antitrust litigation: a plaintiff settles with one defendant and keeps the other in the fight, while the terms of the deal become ammunition for everyone left standing. What makes this one unusual is the theater around it. Musk's companies chose to settle with Apple — the company they accused of building an illegal monopoly — while continuing to pursue OpenAI, the company they accused of benefiting from that monopoly. The logic only holds if the remaining claims against OpenAI can stand on their own. OpenAI's bet, stated plainly in its filing, is that the settlement terms prove they cannot.

The feud, meanwhile, has long since escaped the courtroom. Musk and Altman — who once sat on the same nonprofit board — now trade public blows with the regularity of a cable-news feud, even as both Musk and Altman publicly backed the AI slowdown manifesto led by Anthropic's Dario Amodei last week. Lawsuits, slowdown letters, competing hardware: the two men are fighting on every available front at once. Thursday's filing will decide whether the Texas front narrows — or blows wide open.

Apple–Musk settlement FAQ

Who ordered the disclosure?

U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman of the Fort Worth division of the Northern District of Texas, in an order issued Sept. 15.

What's the deadline?

X Corp and SpaceXAI had to file the Apple agreement with the court by Sept. 17 and respond to OpenAI's demands.

Why does OpenAI want the terms?

It says the terms could affect its defenses, including its contention that its arrangement with Apple was never exclusive, and could undercut any effort by Musk's companies to seek a monetary payment from OpenAI.

What's next?

OpenAI's summary-judgment motion, now due later under an agreed 14-day extension. No dollar figure had surfaced publicly as of Sept. 17.

Sources: Reporting for this article relied on Reuters (Sept. 16 and July 10, 2026, and Nov. 13, 2025), TheWrap, Bloomberg Law, 9to5Mac, TechCrunch, the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, CNN, Engadget, and Morningstar.