SAN FRANCISCO — OpenAI has hired outside legal counsel and is actively preparing a range of legal options against Apple Inc., including the possibility of sending the iPhone maker a formal breach-of-contract notice, according to a report published Thursday afternoon by Bloomberg News correspondent Mark Gurman that was independently confirmed by Reuters within hours. The escalation is the strongest signal yet that the two-year-old partnership announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2024 — under which ChatGPT was integrated into Siri and other Apple Intelligence features — has reached a breaking point, with the AI company telling people familiar with the deliberations that the integration has failed to deliver anywhere close to the subscriber and revenue growth OpenAI had projected when the deal was struck.
The legal effort, per Bloomberg, is being run by OpenAI lawyers working with an unnamed outside firm. The most likely near-term outcome is a formal breach-of-contract notice to Apple rather than an immediate lawsuit, according to people familiar with the matter cited by both Bloomberg and Reuters. OpenAI still hopes to resolve the dispute outside of court and is unlikely to escalate further until the conclusion of its ongoing trial with xAI chief executive and Tesla Inc. chief executive Elon Musk, who has accused OpenAI of abandoning its nonprofit founding mission. Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment. OpenAI declined to comment on the initial reports.
The core complaint inside OpenAI, according to Gurman’s reporting, is that Apple never built the deep, prominent ChatGPT integration the AI company believed it had been promised. OpenAI executives expected ChatGPT to be woven across additional Apple apps and to receive premium placement within the Siri assistant. Instead, the integration has been buried in Apple software, with features that users struggle to discover and revenue from new ChatGPT subscriptions generated through the partnership running at a fraction of what OpenAI projected. The AI company had internally modeled the deal as a potential multibillion-dollar annual revenue stream; the actual figure, per Bloomberg, has not come close. “We have done everything from a product perspective,” one OpenAI executive told Bloomberg. “They have not, and worse, they haven’t even made an honest effort.” A separate executive added: “They basically said, ‘OpenAI needs to take a leap of faith and trust us.’ It didn’t work out well.”
The financial architecture of the 2024 partnership is the structural reason OpenAI’s frustration is so acute. No money changed hands when the deal was signed. Apple did not pay OpenAI for the use of ChatGPT, and OpenAI absorbed the server and inference costs of running queries from Apple users. The economics were premised on a much larger subscription pipeline: iPhone, iPad, and Mac users would discover ChatGPT through Siri, upgrade to ChatGPT Plus at $20 a month, and Apple would receive a cut of the resulting subscription revenue under the standard App Store revenue-share model. With most users sticking to the standalone ChatGPT app rather than the Siri-routed version, neither side appears to have captured material upside.
Apple has its own grievances that frame the dispute differently. According to Bloomberg, Apple executives have raised concerns about OpenAI’s privacy practices, which sit awkwardly against Apple’s core marketing positioning as a privacy-first technology company. Apple has also been “fuming for more than a year,” per 9to5Mac’s Chance Miller citing Bloomberg, over OpenAI’s aggressive recruiting of Apple engineers — particularly for the OpenAI hardware effort being led by former Apple chief design officer Sir Jony Ive, who joined OpenAI in 2024 to build a family of AI-native consumer devices. OpenAI declined to participate when Apple approached it about working on the next-generation Siri redesign, with people familiar telling Bloomberg that the AI company felt burned by the original partnership.
The timing puts the dispute on top of Apple’s most important product announcement of the year. Apple’s WWDC 2026 keynote is scheduled for June 8, less than four weeks away, and the company is expected to unveil a redesigned Siri powered by Alphabet Inc.’s Google Gemini, alongside support for Anthropic’s Claude as an alternative model selectable by users. The partnership with OpenAI was never structured as exclusive, and the Bloomberg sources emphasized that Apple’s expansion to additional AI providers is not what is driving OpenAI’s legal action — the deal explicitly contemplated other providers from the start. Bloomberg’s Gurman has separately reported that iOS 27, due in public release in September, will introduce an “Extensions” framework in Siri that allows users to route queries to OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, or other models of their choice, which could in practice give ChatGPT more visibility than the current integration provides.
The broader context is the steadily deteriorating leverage of OpenAI across its biggest commercial partnerships. The company’s relationship with Microsoft Corp., its single largest backer and infrastructure provider, has been strained by OpenAI’s push for greater operational independence ahead of its widely anticipated IPO and by competing compute deals — including the SpaceX Colossus 1 agreement under which xAI’s Grok models now run, and Anthropic’s expanded compute footprint at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman is simultaneously fighting the Musk trial, managing a costly compute-buildout cycle, defending the company’s nonprofit-to-for-profit conversion before regulators, and navigating an AI competitive landscape that has materially tightened over the past 12 months as Anthropic, Google, and xAI have closed quality gaps that OpenAI had once owned by a wide margin.
For Apple, the legal exposure is meaningful but bounded. The company has weathered far larger disputes — the Epic Games Inc. antitrust trial, ongoing European Union Digital Markets Act litigation, and the Department of Justice App Store case — without material impact on its roughly $3.5 trillion market value. A breach-of-contract notice from OpenAI would generate headlines into WWDC and potentially complicate the rollout of the Gemini-powered Siri, but it is not the kind of risk that bond investors or major institutional shareholders are likely to reprice. For OpenAI, the calculation is the opposite. The company is privately held, racing toward an IPO, and locked in trench warfare with Musk in a courtroom that is simultaneously consuming senior executive bandwidth. A loud legal fight with one of the world’s most powerful and best-lawyered consumer technology companies, at the precise moment OpenAI is trying to make a clean case to public-market investors, is a risk Altman’s team appears to be calculating very carefully before deciding whether to send the letter.
— JBizNews Desk
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