OpenAI prepares grievances against Apple over ChatGPT in Siri and weak iPhone integration

OpenAI is preparing for a possible legal dispute with Apple over how ChatGPT was built into the iPhone ecosystem. Inside the company, the view is that the high-profile 2024 partnership delivered neither the promised visibility nor the expected growth in subscriptions.

Why the conflict surfaced

According to Bloomberg, OpenAI has hired an outside law firm and is discussing several courses of action against Apple. One is a formal notice of a possible breach of contract. This does not necessarily mean a full-scale lawsuit yet: the companies may first try to put their grievances on record formally and use that as leverage for new negotiations. TechCrunch adds that any tougher steps will likely be postponed until OpenAI's current court case with Elon Musk is over.

The problem is that in 2024 the deal looked almost ideal for both sides. Apple got a ready-made language model for Siri and related Apple Intelligence features, and OpenAI got access to one of the largest mobile ecosystems in the world. Inside OpenAI, the expectation was that the integration would bring a noticeable increase in paid subscriptions and cement ChatGPT as the main AI interface for millions of iPhone, iPad and Mac owners.

What OpenAI is unhappy about

Almost two years later, those expectations have not been met. According to reports from Bloomberg and write-ups by TechCrunch and MacRumors, OpenAI believes Apple buried the integration too deep in the product: ChatGPT's capabilities are hard to notice, get no real promotion, and the user experience looks cut down compared with the standalone ChatGPT app. In Siri this is especially visible: for some requests the user has to explicitly address ChatGPT, and answers inside Apple's interface look more limited than in OpenAI's main service.

"We were essentially told:

OpenAI should just take our word for it."

This phrase, which one OpenAI executive relayed to Bloomberg, explains the source of the irritation well. The company believes it did its part on the product side, but Apple gave its partner neither sufficient visibility nor an honest attempt to scale usage. Inside OpenAI there is also concern that this presentation not only fails to convert users into subscribers but also dilutes the ChatGPT brand itself. Against this background, negotiations on revising the terms have, according to MacRumors, hit a dead end.

• ChatGPT did not get a prominent place inside Siri
• Some features ended up buried too deep in the interface
• Answers inside Apple's interface look poorer than in the ChatGPT app
• Subscription growth came in far below OpenAI's internal expectations
• Negotiations on revising the agreement produced no result

Apple, judging by the same reports, has accumulated its own grievances. The company is concerned about OpenAI's privacy standards and its hardware ambitions. As TechCrunch writes, a separate source of irritation is that OpenAI is actively moving toward its own devices together with former senior Apple executives. For Apple, OpenAI is no longer just a model supplier but a potential future competitor for the user interface and for the device itself.

How Apple treats its partners

The story fits Apple's long-standing pattern: the company likes to take on a strong partner, quickly build its capabilities into its own platform, and then tightly control how visible that partner is to the user. For outside developers, this is always a deal with enormous reach but a very weak negotiating position. The platform belongs to Apple, and everyone else works within its rules. Apple decides where a feature appears, what it is called and how much space it gets in the interface.

TechCrunch points out that OpenAI is not the first. The best-known 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 raw state and taking one of the most painful reputational 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 a partnership with Apple almost always stays asymmetric: while you strengthen the platform, you are needed; when strategic interests change, your role shrinks quickly.

What this means

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