Apple's $1B AI toll booth

THE MOST LUCRATIVE artificial-intelligence strategy of 2025 may belong to the company with the worst chatbot. Apple is on pace to surpass $1 billion in AI revenue this year — not by building a frontier model, not by deploying a fleet of data centers, but by collecting a commission every time someone subscribes to ChatGPT through an iPhone. It is the kind of elegant arbitrage that would make a Renaissance toll collector blush.

The mechanics are straightforward, if quietly ruthless. Generative AI apps paid Apple nearly $900 million in App Store fees last year, according to AppMagic, the analysis firm. Three-quarters of that haul came from a single source: OpenAI's ChatGPT. Grok, xAI's chatbot, accounted for roughly 5%. The App Store's standard terms — approximately 30% of subscription fees in the first year, dropping to 15% thereafter — apply to AI apps the same way they apply to meditation timers and calorie counters. However sophisticated the underlying model, Apple's cut is the same.

As a share of Apple's total revenue, a billion dollars barely registers. But within the services business — the segment investors have fixated on for its superior growth rate and fatter margins relative to hardware — generative AI apps represent one of the few categories still accelerating. Monthly commissions from GenAI apps climbed from around $35 million in January 2025 to a peak of $101 million in August, before retreating as ChatGPT downloads cooled.