OpenAI has hired an outside law firm to evaluate legal options against Apple, according to Bloomberg. The nature of the dispute hasn't been disclosed publicly, but the move signals serious tension between two companies that announced a high-profile integration deal at WWDC 2024 - one where Apple would hand off certain Siri queries to ChatGPT rather than answering them natively through Apple Intelligence.
That arrangement gave OpenAI access to hundreds of millions of iPhone users at no distribution cost. For Apple, it papered over Siri's capability gaps while its own AI features were still being built. On paper, it looked like a clean exchange. Something has since gone wrong.
Hiring outside counsel doesn't mean a lawsuit is coming. Companies routinely bring in specialized firms to assess their options before deciding whether to litigate, renegotiate, or drop the matter entirely. But it does mean OpenAI considers whatever the issue is significant enough to put formal legal weight behind it.
OpenAI's partner relationships have been uneven. The Microsoft arrangement, which funds much of OpenAI's compute budget, has attracted ongoing scrutiny over equity and control terms. Earlier collaborators have raised concerns about how OpenAI handled data and commercial interests as the company scaled. The Apple situation appears to add another strained relationship to that list.
For anyone whose workflow runs through ChatGPT, the practical concern is what a fractured Apple deal means for distribution. The iOS integration put ChatGPT in front of users who never downloaded the app - a passive acquisition channel that's hard to replace. If that access gets pulled or restructured, it won't collapse OpenAI's user base, but it would remove a meaningful referral pipeline that most competitors don't have access to.