Analysis
Court documents filed in OpenAI's ongoing antitrust dispute with Elon Musk's xAI reveal that OpenAI internally described its ChatGPT integration into Apple's Siri as "persistently underperforming," according to MacRumors and TechRadar.
What The Filings Actually Say
OpenAI's own internal analysis, cited in the filings, states plainly that "Apple Intelligence saw minimal usage." By January 2025 -- barely a month after Apple added ChatGPT to Siri in December 2024 -- OpenAI had already cut its forecast for the number of incremental logged-in weekly active users it expected the partnership to generate. The filings describe the integration's performance as "dramatically underperforming" relative to OpenAI's own initial expectations for the deal.
“The filings describe the integration's performance as "dramatically underperforming" relative to OpenAI's own initial expectations for the deal.”
Why OpenAI Is Volunteering This Admission
The disclosures are not a leak -- they're OpenAI's own legal strategy. xAI has argued that Apple's decision to route certain Siri queries to ChatGPT gave OpenAI an unfair, anticompetitive advantage over rival AI assistants, xAI's Grok included. OpenAI's counter is direct: if the integration drove only minimal usage, there's no meaningful competitive advantage for xAI to have been harmed by, and no exclusivity claim can produce damages against an integration this quiet. Admitting the partnership flopped is, in this specific legal context, a defense rather than an embarrassment.
Why It Flopped: The Opt-In Friction
Apple's implementation required users to go through a multi-step opt-in process before Siri would hand a query to ChatGPT rather than answering with Apple's own more limited tools -- friction that likely suppressed adoption well below what a default, no-opt-in integration would have produced. That detail matters beyond this lawsuit: it's evidence that placement alone doesn't guarantee usage in AI products, and that consumers largely didn't go out of their way to enable a third-party AI layered onto a system assistant they already had.
The Wider Apple-OpenAI Backdrop
This disclosure surfaces the same week Apple and OpenAI are separately escalating an unrelated trade-secrets lawsuit, in which Apple alleges a former engineer carried confidential material to OpenAI. Two independent legal fights are now both producing unflattering internal detail about the Apple-OpenAI relationship in the same news cycle -- a reminder that a splashy platform partnership announcement and the messy commercial reality behind it can diverge sharply, and that the gap sometimes only becomes public once litigation forces disclosure.
For competitors and challengers in the AI-assistant space -- Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, and xAI's own Grok -- the practical lesson is that owning distribution through a dominant platform doesn't automatically translate into engagement if the integration adds friction a user has to actively opt into.