OpenAI Eyes Legal Action Against Apple Over Buried Siri ChatGPT

OpenAI has retained outside counsel to explore potential legal action against Apple over a Siri integration that the AI company says has generated a fraction of the subscription revenue it was promised when the deal was announced at WWDC in June 2024, according to reporting from Bloomberg and TechCrunch published May 14.

The partnership embedded ChatGPT into Siri and Apple's Visual Intelligence feature across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, with OpenAI expecting the placement to drive substantial new ChatGPT Plus subscription conversions. Instead, the company says the integration has been "buried" within Apple's software — difficult for users to discover and far from the prominent default position that OpenAI says it understood to be part of the arrangement. One OpenAI executive characterised Apple's posture after revenue failed to materialise as: "They basically said, 'OpenAI needs to take a leap of faith and trust us.' It didn't work out well."

From Partnership to Legal Consideration

The legal consideration underway at OpenAI does not yet constitute a filed lawsuit. Outside counsel have been retained to evaluate options, with a formal breach-of-contract notice — a step short of litigation — described as the most likely initial move if OpenAI decides to proceed. Any legal action would almost certainly be timed to avoid conflicting with the Musk trial currently underway in Oakland, which is consuming significant management attention and legal resources.

The precise terms of the OpenAI-Apple agreement have not been disclosed publicly, and both companies have declined to comment on the Bloomberg and TechCrunch reporting. The legal question hinges on whether Apple made specific representations about feature placement and user exposure that constituted contractual obligations — a factual question whose answer depends on written agreement terms and internal communications that would not become public unless litigation proceeds to discovery.

TechCrunch noted that OpenAI is not the first technology partner to feel commercially disadvantaged by the mechanics of Apple's ecosystem. App store developers, advertising networks, and media companies have all argued at various points that Apple's control over the discovery and default layers of iOS gives it disproportionate leverage to extract value from partners while controlling how prominently those partners' products are surfaced to users.

Apple's Pivot to Google Gemini

The dispute is complicated by Apple's January 2026 agreement with Google to power Apple Intelligence with Gemini models. Bloomberg reported that Apple is paying Google approximately $1 billion annually under a multiyear deal that positions Gemini as the primary AI backbone for Siri and Apple Intelligence rather than ChatGPT.

From OpenAI's perspective, that deal effectively displaced ChatGPT from the position of strategic partner to a fallback option in an ecosystem where the default matters enormously for consumer behaviour. Apple's pattern of accepting third-party content or services and subsequently developing or licensing a competing alternative is familiar to anyone who watched its relationships with mapping providers, music services, and email clients over the past decade.

The Google deal also creates a legally relevant question about whether Apple made commitments to OpenAI regarding exclusivity or preferred status that were rendered meaningless by the subsequent Gemini arrangement. That is presumably one area where OpenAI's outside counsel are focusing their review.

WWDC and What Comes Next

Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference is expected in June, where iOS 27 will be detailed publicly. Developers and analysts expect the operating system to deepen the Gemini integration and further reduce the prominence of third-party AI options within the default Siri experience.

If OpenAI sends a formal breach-of-contract notice before or during WWDC, the timing would maximise press attention and put Apple in the uncomfortable position of defending its AI partnerships at its most publicly scrutinised developer event. That calculus is likely factored into OpenAI's decision about when to act.

The dispute is also likely to feed ongoing congressional scrutiny of Apple's App Store policies and ecosystem control. The EU's Digital Markets Act, which designates Apple as a gatekeeper and requires non-discriminatory access to core platform services, could provide a parallel regulatory avenue for complaints about AI integration terms — particularly if European AI providers or consumers argue they have been affected by similar practices.