OpenAI: Apple's ChatGPT-in-Siri Deal 'Persistently Underperformed'

OpenAI has told a federal court that its ChatGPT integration inside Siri has been "persistently underperforming" since Apple shipped it in December 2024, according to court documents in Elon Musk's xAI antitrust case reported by the Financial Times.

The filing traces the disappointment from the start. By January 2025, less than two months after launch, OpenAI internally said the rollout was "off to a slow start" and cut its forecast for the incremental logged-in weekly active users it expected the partnership to deliver. By the time Musk's companies filed suit, OpenAI's own language in the pleading was blunter: "it was clear that Apple's integration of ChatGPT was dramatically underperforming."

The feature ships off by default and requires a multi-step opt-in before Siri will hand a query to ChatGPT, MacRumors reported from the same filing. Behind the scenes, OpenAI had asked for a two-year exclusivity window and Apple refused. The signed contract explicitly said Apple retained the right to "integrate products or services that provide the same or similar functionality as [ChatGPT]," and Apple has since exercised it, signing a deal with Google that puts Gemini behind the newest Siri models.

OpenAI is now turning those disappointing numbers into its legal defense. As 9to5Mac summarized the response to xAI, the company argues the contract itself proves there was no exclusive deal, and that even if there had been, xAI cannot show antitrust harm from an integration that failed to draw many new ChatGPT users in the first place. The filing references a March 2026 conversation between Apple and OpenAI that is redacted in the unsealed version. Musk dropped the Apple half of the case earlier in September and is continuing against OpenAI alone, part of a broader legal season we have been tracking closely between the two companies.