OPENAI HIRED A LAW FIRM TO GO AFTER APPLE — THE CHATGPT DEAL THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO REACH 2.5 BILLION IPHONES IS FALLING APART OpenAI is exploring legal action against Apple over a partnership that has not delivered what the AI company expected, according to reporting from TechCrunch. OpenAI enlisted outside counsel to examine its options, including sending Apple a formal breach-of-contract notice, after concluding that the ChatGPT integration Apple unveiled at WWDC 2025 failed to produce the subscriber growth and prominence it was promised. The deal was supposed to be a distribution coup. ChatGPT baked into Siri, available by default on iOS, with Apple’s 2.5 billion active devices acting as a pipeline straight into OpenAI’s subscription funnel. What actually happened is disputed, but OpenAI’s internal assessment is that the integration was buried, poorly marketed, and engineered in a way that limited how many users ever found it. Apple is simultaneously moving in a different direction. The company is preparing an Extensions feature for iOS 27 that would let users choose their own AI provider, including Google and Anthropic, to power Apple Intelligence features. If that ships, it turns Apple into an AI marketplace rather than an OpenAI distribution partner, which is a fundamentally different and far less valuable relationship for OpenAI. For OpenAI the stakes are not trivial. Apple controls the most valuable consumer hardware ecosystem on earth. A public legal dispute between the two companies would be one of the more consequential tech conflicts of the year. Keywords: OpenAI Apple lawsuit, ChatGPT Apple integration, OpenAI legal action, Apple Intelligence AI 2026