OpenAI prepares claims against Apple over ChatGPT in Siri and poor integration on iPhone

OpenAI is preparing for a potential legal dispute with Apple over how ChatGPT has been integrated into the iPhone ecosystem. Inside the company, there is a belief that the high-profile 2024 partnership delivered neither the promised visibility nor the expected subscription growth.

Why the Conflict Emerged

According to Bloomberg, OpenAI has engaged external legal counsel and is discussing several options for further action against Apple. One of them is a formal notice of potential contract breach. This does not necessarily mean a full-scale lawsuit: the companies may first try to formally document the claims and use them as leverage for new negotiations.

TechCrunch adds that any more aggressive steps will likely be postponed until the completion of OpenAI's current lawsuit with Elon Musk. The problem is that in 2024, the deal looked almost perfect for both sides. Apple got a ready-made language model for Siri and related Apple Intelligence features, while OpenAI got access to one of the world's largest mobile ecosystems.

Inside OpenAI, they expected the integration would give the company a noticeable increase in paid subscriptions and cement ChatGPT as the primary AI interface for millions of iPhone, iPad, and Mac owners.

What Disappointed OpenAI

After nearly two years, expectations were not met. According to Bloomberg reports and retellings in TechCrunch and MacRumors, OpenAI believes Apple buried the integration too deep in the product: ChatGPT capabilities are hard to notice, they don't receive notable promotion, and the user scenario looks cut down compared to the standalone ChatGPT app. This is especially noticeable in Siri: for some queries, users need to explicitly address ChatGPT, and answers within Apple's interface look more limited than in OpenAI's main service.

"We were essentially told: OpenAI should just trust us."

This quote, which one of OpenAI's executives relayed to Bloomberg, well explains the source of frustration. The company believes it did its part on the product side, but Apple did not give its partner either sufficient visibility or a genuine attempt to scale usage. Inside OpenAI, there are also concerns that such presentation not only fails to convert users to subscriptions but also dilutes the ChatGPT brand itself. Against this backdrop, negotiations to revise the terms, according to MacRumors, have reached a dead end.

• ChatGPT failed to get a notable place within Siri
• Some features ended up hidden too deep in the interface
• Answers within Apple look poorer than in the ChatGPT app
• Subscription growth turned out to be much lower than OpenAI's internal expectations
• Negotiations to revise the agreement yielded no results

According to the same reports, Apple has also accumulated complaints. The company is concerned about OpenAI's privacy standards, and also about its ambitions in hardware. A separate source of irritation, as TechCrunch writes, was the fact that OpenAI is actively moving toward its own devices together with former Apple executives. For Apple, this is no longer just a model supplier, but a potential future competitor for the user interface and the device itself.

How Apple Treats Partners

The story fits well into Apple's long-standing style: the company loves to take a strong partner, quickly integrate its capabilities into its platform, and then tightly control how visible that partner will be to users. For outside developers, this has always been a deal with huge reach but with a very weak negotiating position. The platform belongs to Apple, and everyone else operates within its rules.

It is Apple that decides where a feature appears, what it's called, and how much space it gets in the interface. TechCrunch recalls that OpenAI is not the first here. The most famous example is Google Maps.

Google Maps was one of the key features of the early iPhone, but in 2012 Apple replaced it with its own solution, launching Apple Maps in a rough state and incurring one of the most painful reputation hits in its history. Tim Cook even had to apologize publicly. The point of the precedent is not that the current situation is identical, but that partnerships with Apple almost always remain asymmetrical: while you strengthen the platform, you are needed; when strategic interests change, your role quickly shrinks.

What This Means

If the conflict reaches even a formal notice of contract violation, it will be a rare case where a major AI supplier openly disputes with Apple not over technology, but over the distribution of attention, revenue, and control over the interface. For the market, this is a signal: even high-profile AI partnerships no longer guarantee real audience access if the last mile is entirely owned by the platform. And this is especially important ahead of Apple's next announcement on Siri and third-party AI models.