OpenAI lawyers up on Apple

SAM ALTMAN, OpenAI's boss, sat in the audience at Apple Park in June 2024 while Craig Federighi, Apple's software chief, described his firm as "the pioneer and market leader" in artificial intelligence. Two years on, OpenAI has retained outside counsel to draft a breach-of-contract notice against the same host.

The notice, first reported by Bloomberg last week, is not yet a lawsuit. OpenAI's executives say they hope to resolve their grievances outside court, and any formal complaint will likely wait until the firm's existing legal entanglement with Elon Musk, one of its co-founders, concludes. The point, for now, is the letter itself: a company famous for the speed of its product cycles has decided that its main remaining lever against Apple is paperwork.

The grievances are substantive: ChatGPT, OpenAI insists, was integrated into Apple's operating systems in name more than in practice. Users wanting OpenAI's chatbot through Siri must specifically invoke the word "ChatGPT"; the responses arrive in a small window with limited information, far thinner than what the standalone ChatGPT app offers on the same device. Apple, OpenAI executives complain, has not promoted the integration. Subscriptions through Apple — which OpenAI once believed could generate billions in annual revenue — have not materialized at meaningful scale. The startup's own customer studies, described by people familiar with them, conclude that iPhone users overwhelmingly prefer the standalone app to anything Apple wraps around it.