OpenAI has hired an outside law firm to weigh legal action against Apple over the ChatGPT integration announced at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2024, Bloomberg News reported Thursday. The options on the table include sending Apple a formal breach-of-contract notice, short of a full lawsuit. Any escalation would likely wait until after the conclusion of Elon Musk's ongoing trial against OpenAI.
The grievance, per Bloomberg, is that the ChatGPT integration into Siri and the iPhone's Visual Intelligence feature has been buried inside Apple's operating system, with features hard to find and revenue running well below what OpenAI had projected. At signing, OpenAI expected the deal to funnel billions of dollars in new ChatGPT subscriptions and surface its product across one of the most-used mobile platforms in the world.
"They basically said, 'OpenAI needs to take a leap of faith and trust us,'" one OpenAI executive told Bloomberg. "It didn't work out well."
Key facts
- 01OpenAI has hired an outside law firm to weigh options including a formal breach-of-contract notice against Apple, Bloomberg reported Thursday.
- 02The ChatGPT-Siri integration was announced at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2024 and built into Visual Intelligence on iPhone.
- 03Apple agreed in January 2026 to pay Google roughly $1 billion a year to power Apple Intelligence with Gemini models.
- 04The European Commission fined Apple nearly €1.8 billion in March 2024 over App Store practices that disadvantaged Spotify after Apple Music's 2015 launch.
- 05Any legal move by OpenAI would likely wait until after the conclusion of Elon Musk's ongoing trial against the company.
Apple has its own complaints. Bloomberg reports the company has raised concerns about OpenAI's privacy standards and is irritated by OpenAI's push into consumer hardware, an effort led by former Apple design chief Jony Ive. Apple has not publicly responded to the legal-action reporting.
“They basically said, 'OpenAI needs to take a leap of faith and trust us. It didn't work out well.'”— Jaeden Schafer
The integration itself wires ChatGPT into Siri as an opt-in answer source and into Visual Intelligence, which lets iPhone users point a camera at their surroundings and send the photo to ChatGPT with a related question. OpenAI's read is that the placement is too deep in the stack to drive the conversions the partnership was scoped around.
Apple's history with software partners on iPhone is the relevant context. Google Maps shipped as a flagship feature of the 2007 iPhone, was removed in 2012 and replaced by Apple Maps, and prompted a public apology from Tim Cook over the quality gap. The Google relationship had been deteriorating since Android launched a year after the iPhone's 2007 debut, and tightened further after Eric Schmidt stepped down from Apple's board in 2009.
Adobe sits in the same category. Steve Jobs refused to allow Flash on the iPhone and iPad, and his 2010 open letter explaining why effectively ended Flash on mobile. Spotify, for its part, spent years arguing that Apple used its App Store control to disadvantage rival streaming services after Apple Music launched in 2015 — an argument the European Commission accepted in March 2024 with a fine of nearly €1.8 billion.
Even rifts of that size can be papered over when the economics line up. In January 2026, Apple struck a multiyear deal with Google to power the next generation of Apple Intelligence using Gemini models, with Apple paying roughly $1 billion a year. That arrangement now sits alongside, and arguably above, the OpenAI integration in Apple's AI stack.
OpenAI's partner relationships have been visibly strained on more than one front. Musk's lawsuit, which accuses the company of abandoning its nonprofit founding mission, is currently at trial. The company has also reportedly worked through tensions with Microsoft, its largest backer and infrastructure partner, as it pushes for greater independence ahead of an eventual IPO.
The caveat worth flagging: nothing has been filed. Hiring outside counsel and exploring a breach notice is a long way from a complaint in court, and the leaked posture may be aimed as much at renegotiating placement inside iOS as at any courtroom outcome. Apple has not commented, and the specific contract terms — including any volume, surfacing, or revenue-share commitments — are not public.
For OpenAI, the strategic question is whether distribution through a platform owner it cannot control is worth the dependency. Apple's Gemini deal already shows that the iPhone's AI surface is not exclusive, and OpenAI's hardware push with Jony Ive suggests the company is hedging toward owning its own device. A breach notice, filed or merely threatened, is the negotiating leverage that comes before that bet pays off — and Apple's track record with Google Maps, Flash, and Spotify is the reason the leverage is being prepared now rather than later.
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