Is the marriage over? Maybe.
According to Mark Gurman and the NYT, OpenAI is looking into legal action against Apple. Why? A potential breach of contract involving that ChatGPT integration everyone hyped up last year.
Remember when this seemed like a fairy tale? It was 2024. Big deal. ChatGPT goes into iPhone, Siri gets a glow up. Simple enough. But two years in? The honeymoon phase is dead.
Here’s the problem. OpenAI thought users would see Apple Intelligence, get curious, and sign up for paid ChatGPT subs. That was the plan. That was the bet. Instead, ChatGPT is hidden. Buried under layers of Apple interface, almost impossible to find for the average Joe.
Then Google walks in.
January rolled around, and Apple confirmed the obvious: they signed with Google’s Gemini for Siri and other AI features. The door slammed shut on OpenAI. Hard.
Now we have this awkward triangle.
Apple recently paid a $250M class-action settlement because they failed to deliver on their early AI promises. No admission of guilt, just a big check to quiet things down. Typical. Meanwhile, OpenAI feels burned. They say Apple didn’t honor the spirit of their agreement. They’re drafting a notice. Legal threats are in the works.
Who can blame them? Or maybe they’re just posturing to force a renegotiation. Hard to say.
There is another elephant in the room though. OpenAI’s board is tied up in the wreckage of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Sam Altman. The trial is looming. The future of the company is hanging on a jury’s decision in another courtroom entirely. Do they have the bandwidth for a new war with Apple?
The partnership appears to be less of a marriage and more of a hostile merger in slow motion.
So we wait.
Does OpenAI pull the trigger on the lawsuit? Do they blink first? Or does Apple shrug and keep integrating Google, leaving ChatGPT to rot in a submenu somewhere?
It feels like the AI era is full of bad breaks and worse contracts.
