OpenAI reportedly mulls taking Apple to court over ChatGPT’s Siri integration

OpenAI Group PBC has reportedly become so upset with Apple Inc. over its poor handling of the ChatGPT-Siri integration that it’s now exploring legal action against the company.

A report by Bloomberg today said the company is dismayed that the partnership failed to acquire the new subscribers it hoped to gain, and has resorted to hiring an independent legal firm to explore its options. According to unnamed people familiar with the matter, the company could slap Apple with a lawsuit, or it could send the company a formal breach-of-contract notice without going to the courts immediately.

The two companies first announced their partnership amid great fanfare in 2024, saying they will integrate ChatGPT with Apple’s Siri digital assistant in the iOS 18 platform. OpenAI believed that the integration, which embedded ChatGPT into Apple’s software ecosystem, would result in the chatbot gaining a significant number of new subscribers. It also hoped for “deeper integration across more Apple apps and prime placement within the Siri assistant.”

Bloomberg quoted an anonymous OpenAI executive as saying that his company has “done everything from a product perspective,” but Apple failed to hold up its end of the bargain. “They haven’t even made an honest effort,” he complained.

The integration was supposed to coax users to sign up for a paid ChatGPT subscription via the iPhone’s Settings app. OpenAI reportedly hoped this would generate “billions of dollars per year” in additional subscription revenue, but that “hasn’t come close to happening.” The OpenAI executive revealed that the company was led to believe it would be able to acquire a huge number of customers through the agreement, but wasn’t told exactly how that would happen. “They basically said, ‘OpenAI needs to take a leap of faith and trust us,’” the executive said, adding that the deal ended up being a failure for the startup.

While no money changed hands as part of the deal, Apple is supposed to be getting a cut out of whatever new subscriptions OpenAI manages to sell through its ecosystem.

The report comes just ahead of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, where the iPhone maker is expected to announce a revamped version of Siri that’s powered by Google LLC’s Gemini. The iOS 27 platform will also be upgraded, allowing users to integrate other AI models, including Anthropic PBC’s chatbot Claude. The OpenAI executive said this is not the reason for the company’s legal action, because the partnership was never supposed to be an exclusive one.

There is tension on Apple’s side too. OpenAI is reportedly working on the development of its own hardware products, and it has poached a number of the iPhone company’s engineers to help build those devices. The effort is being led by former Apple design chief Jony Ive, who has brought many of his former colleagues along with him. Apple executives have reportedly been “fuming” over OpenAI’s recruitment tactics.

ChatGPT is currently integrated in various aspects of iOS. It acts as a fallback for Siri for world-knowledge queries and can also be found in the Image Playgrounds and Visual Intelligence applications. The executive told Bloomberg that the company has not yet made a final decision on whether to pursue legal action against Apple, and still hopes to resolve the issue out of court.

OpenAI is certainly not the first company to fall out with Apple. The iPhone maker has a long history of upsetting and alienating former partners, with the most famous being Google itself. The company was once reliant on Google Maps, which was a flagship feature of the original iPhone device that launched in 2007, making it mobile for the first time. But Apple later became upset with Google when it introduced the Android smartphone operating system a year later and became its major rival in the then-nascent smartphone market. The rivalry intensified over the years, and Apple ultimately dropped Google Maps from the iPhone altogether, replacing it with an Apple Maps product that was so inferior that it was universally panned by iPhone users, forcing Chief Executive Tim Cook to make a rare public apology over its poor performance.

Another company jilted by Apple was Spotify Inc., which became upset with the launch of the Apple Music app, a competitor to its own, in 2015. Spotify complained for years that Apple was leveraging its control over the App Store to disadvantage its own product. It finally won a moral victory in 2024 when the European Commission agreed with its complaint and slapped Apple with a €1.8 billion fine.

Image: OpenAI