The relationship between Apple and OpenAI has gone from promising to openly hostile, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
OpenAI lawyers are actively working with an outside legal firm on potential action against Apple, with options including sending a formal breach of contract notice without necessarily filing a full lawsuit, the people said. Any legal move likely wouldn’t come until after OpenAI wraps up its ongoing trial with Elon Musk.
The frustration stems from a deal that OpenAI says never delivered what was promised. When the partnership was announced at Apple’s campus in June 2024, the expectation was that weaving ChatGPT into Apple’s software would funnel a large number of users toward paid subscriptions and lead to deeper integration across Apple’s apps and a prominent role within Siri. Neither happened.
“We have done everything from a product perspective,” one OpenAI executive told Bloomberg, speaking anonymously. “They have not, and worse, they haven’t even made an honest effort.”
According to the people familiar with the matter, Apple’s implementation made ChatGPT genuinely hard to find. Users typically need to specifically say the word “ChatGPT” when using Siri to get results from OpenAI, and responses appear in a small window with limited information compared to the standalone app. OpenAI executives believe Apple never properly promoted the integration across iPhone, iPad or Mac.
User studies conducted by OpenAI found that Apple customers are far more likely to open the standalone ChatGPT app than access the technology through Siri or Apple’s other services. OpenAI had initially believed the deal could generate billions of dollars annually in subscriptions.
“When we heard about this opportunity, it sounded amazing,” the OpenAI executive said. “They basically said, ‘OpenAI needs to take a leap of faith and trust us.’ The deal ended up being a failure for the startup.”
Apple has had its own concerns, including questions about whether OpenAI does enough to protect user privacy, and frustration over the startup’s push into hardware through its acquisition of a device company co-founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive. Gurman says Apple is also pissed that OpenAI has been poaching its hardware engineers.
Bloomberg has reported that Apple is opening Siri up to rival AI providers later this year as part of iOS 27, with integrations from both Google Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude in testing. That announcement is expected at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on June 8.
Are you using the ChatGPT integration on your iPhone, iPad or Mac? What do you think of it?
Want to see more of our stories on Google?
P.S. Want to keep this site truly independent? Support us by buying us a beer, treating us to a coffee, or shopping through Amazon here. Links in this post are affiliate links, so we earn a tiny commission at no charge to you. Thanks for supporting independent Canadian media!
Data harvesters complaining they weren’t allowed to harvest enough data.