What was supposed to be the biggest AI partnership on the planet ended up being an embarrassing ghost town. Newly unsealed court filings reveal that OpenAI’s integration into Siri and Apple Intelligence was a total flop, with internal teams describing the feature as “dramatically underperforming” almost immediately after its December 2024 launch.
The embarrassing details emerged during OpenAI’s ongoing antitrust battle against Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI ahead of a trial set for January 2027. The documents paint a brutal picture of an alliance that promised millions of new subscribers but delivered virtually nothing to either company’s bottom line.
Friction, zero data, and a quick forecast slash
Why did putting ChatGPT into hundreds of millions of iPhones fail so badly? For starters, Apple buried the entire setup behind a tedious multi-step opt-in process deep inside the Settings app. Even when users triggered advanced tools like Visual Intelligence to analyze camera photos, most either ignored the ChatGPT prompt or simply opened the standalone ChatGPT app directly on their home screens.
By January 2025, barely a month after rollout, OpenAI had to revise its user growth forecast downward. Strict privacy terms also meant that OpenAI could not collect query data or train on Siri traffic. Since there was no data to use for AI training nor a halo effect to support paid subscriptions, the commercial value just vanished. By March 2026, that scenario led to tense, redacted conversations between Apple and OpenAI (via TechRadar).
At the same time, Apple began building its new Apple Foundation Models using Google’s Gemini Frontier models for distillation. This left OpenAI without the two-year exclusivity window it had originally requested.
Dismantling Musk’s “ludicrous” antitrust arguments
OpenAI unsealed these embarrassing numbers specifically to dismantle Elon Musk’s legal claims. Musk’s suit argued that an illegal exclusive pact blocked his chatbot Grok from joining Siri, which supposedly halted X’s evolution into a “super app” that could challenge the App Store and force Apple to cut its 30% developer fee. Musk eventually dropped claims against Apple, leaving OpenAI as the sole defendant in the lawsuit.
To dismiss the suit prior to trial, OpenAI brought in economic expert Dr. Catherine Tucker. She calculated that the actual share of AI consumers accessing ChatGPT through Apple Intelligence was virtually unmeasurable. OpenAI proved the deal was explicitly non-exclusive—noting Apple reserved the right to add other providers and never actually added rival extensions. They also argued that Musk couldn’t claim market damage when iPhone users were barely using Apple’s built-in AI tools in the first place.
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