OpenAI has admitted in a newly filed court document that letting ChatGPT plug into Apple's Siri and Apple Intelligence brought it very few new users. The filing comes from an antitrust suit brought in August 2025 by Elon Musk's xAI, now folded into SpaceX, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, before Judge Mark Pittman.
The timeline laid out in the filing is specific. ChatGPT arrived inside Siri with an iOS update in December 2024, turned off by default, requiring users to work through several setup steps to enable it. About a month after launch, OpenAI's internal assessment was that things were "off to a slow start," and it lowered its expectations for the new weekly active logins the channel would generate. By the time xAI filed suit, the filing's language had hardened further:
"It was clear that Apple's integration of ChatGPT was dramatically underperforming."
Admitting a weak spot to undercut the other side's argument
A company volunteering in court that its own partnership underperformed is a litigation strategy move. xAI's claim is that Apple and OpenAI worked together to lock up the market, giving ChatGPT an exclusive perch on the iPhone and favorable treatment in App Store rankings, squeezing out rivals like Grok.
OpenAI's rebuttal runs on two tracks. First, the contract itself is explicitly non-exclusive, with Apple retaining the right to integrate other products or services offering "the same or similar functionality." According to filing details compiled by 9to5Mac, Apple's software engineering chief Craig Federighi mentioned at the time that Google Gemini could be integrated down the line. Second, even setting exclusivity aside, OpenAI argues the integration barely moved the needle on users, making it hard for xAI to show it was harmed as a result.
OpenAI has asked the court for summary judgment ahead of trial. Per MacRumors, the case was originally set for trial in January 2027. Two portions of the public version of the filing are redacted: one covering a "market foreclosure percentage" figure calculated by an expert OpenAI retained, and another covering a March 2026 conversation between Apple and OpenAI. Neither is currently visible to the public.
The claims against Apple have already been dropped
The parts of this suit targeting Apple were voluntarily withdrawn by the plaintiff and dismissed by the court on September 14; the claims against OpenAI remain active. OpenAI is now the sole defendant left in the case, and it chose to put "the partnership underperformed" on the record itself — a much smaller cost for OpenAI than it would have been for Apple.
Apple has not publicly responded to the filing.
How the relationship got here over the past two years
Lined up against earlier developments, this filing fills in the earliest chapter of the story.
The partnership was announced at WWDC in June 2024, widely read at the time as OpenAI's breakthrough into iPhone-level distribution. In May of this year, reports emerged that OpenAI had retained outside counsel to assess legal action against Apple, driven by the partnership's failure to generate the subscription revenue OpenAI expected. In January, Apple struck a deal with Google to rebuild Siri around Gemini; in July, Apple sued OpenAI over trade secrets, targeting former employees who had moved to OpenAI's hardware team.
This filing pushes the timeline for "underperforming" back to early 2025. In other words, more than a year before the two companies' falling-out became public, OpenAI's internal numbers already looked weak. The default-off, multi-step design was widely read at the time as Apple erring on the side of privacy; in hindsight, it also measurably suppressed usage.
For domestic AI companies still negotiating phone-maker preload deals, the filing offers a rare data point: a system-level integration switched off by default can underperform even a plain app icon by a wide margin. Exactly how wide remains unclear — the weekly active user figures OpenAI cited are redacted in the public version.
Sources: MacRumors, 9to5Mac, CocoLoop, AppleInsider, IT Home, Financial Times; cross-checked against the launch timeline, the contract's non-exclusivity clause and the redacted portions in the public version of OpenAI's court filing.