OpenAI Admits Its Biggest iPhone Partnership Was a "Ghost Town"
Two years after Apple stood on stage and called it a landmark deal, OpenAI has now admitted in a court filing that its ChatGPT integration into Siri was, in its own words, "dramatically underperforming."
The admission came out through an unlikely route — OpenAI's defense in an antitrust lawsuit filed by Elon Musk's SpaceXAI, which had alleged the Apple-OpenAI deal was exclusive and unfairly shut out rivals. In fighting that claim, OpenAI ended up revealing just how badly the partnership actually performed.
Here's what the filings show:
→ ChatGPT launched inside Apple Intelligence and Siri in December 2024, pitched as filling gaps in Siri's world knowledge
→ Within about a month, OpenAI was already cutting its forecasts for new weekly active users — the numbers were "off to a slow start" almost immediately
→ By summer 2025, OpenAI internally concluded the integration was "dramatically underperforming"; by March 2026, it had escalated that language to "persistently underperforming"
→ A major structural reason: the feature was off by default, buried behind a multi-step opt-in process in Settings — friction that meant most users who did try Visual Intelligence or Siri handoffs just opened the standalone ChatGPT app instead
→ Because of strict privacy terms, OpenAI couldn't collect Siri query data or train on that traffic either — so there was no data upside and no subscription upside
→ Apple never expanded the Siri extension further, and instead moved on to build its own Apple Foundation Models — reportedly using a Gemini-based model for distillation — and has now shipped a new Google-powered Siri AI, with the EU rollout delayed over regulatory issues
Here's what stands out to me: this wasn't a technology failure — it was a distribution-design failure. OpenAI got placed on hundreds of millions of iPhones and still couldn't convert that into real usage, because the integration was optional, buried, and disconnected from any data or subscription loop. It's a pointed reminder that being embedded inside the world's biggest platform means nothing if the platform owner controls the defaults, the friction, and the incentive to actually use you.
For Apple, it also raises a harder question — after watching its own high-profile AI bet underperform, is a Google-powered Siri really the fix, or just a different version of the same dependency problem?
Have you ever actually tried the ChatGPT integration inside Siri — or did you just open the ChatGPT app directly like everyone else apparently did?
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