- OpenAI has filed court documents against Elon Musk’s xAI
- The papers reveal that ChatGPT’s integration with Siri was disappointing
- OpenAI alleges that barely anyone was using Apple Intelligence
If you’ve noticed an improvement in Siri’s abilities on your Apple device, you might have Google to thank for that, as its Gemini artificial intelligence (AI) now powers much of what Siri AI can do. Rival services like ChatGPT have also found their way into iOS — but new court documents reveal why that particular partnership has struggled to get off the ground.
The court filings were made in relation to OpenAI’s ongoing dispute with Elon Musk’s rival xAI firm (now known as SpaceXAI). In the documents, OpenAI alleges that, by the time xAI filed its complaint against OpenAI, “it was clear that Apple’s integration of ChatGPT was dramatically underperforming.”
The papers then go on to imply that this was not just some one-off failure. Instead, the Apple integration was “persistently underperforming,” OpenAI alleges.
Apple added ChatGPT integration to Siri in December 2024, but this required a multi-step opt-in process. That could be one reason for the substandard performance of the link-up, with a degree of friction slowing users down in their attempts to harness OpenAI’s tool.
Much of this section of the court filings is redacted, so it’s difficult to know exactly what was going on between Apple and OpenAI. But it seems clear that, at least from the latter’s perspective, the results were severely underwhelming.
What might have been
When Apple Intelligence first launched, Apple provided users with an option to tap into ChatGPT if they needed something a little more powerful. For example, this was an option in Visual Intelligence, providing extra context and help with the images you shot with your iPhone’s camera.
Yet OpenAI’s legal filing makes it clear that barely anyone was using any of ChatGPT’s tie-ins with Apple Intelligence. OpenAI describes the effect the integration had on competitors (like xAI) as being “indisputably de minimis.” It added that its own expert, Dr. Catherine Tucker, calculated “the share of GenAI consumers who accessed ChatGPT through Apple Intelligence” and found it to be “consistent with OpenAI’s internal view that Apple Intelligence saw minimal usage.”
That hints that the problem might not have just been limited to ChatGPT’s integration with Apple devices, but with Apple Intelligence as a whole. Apple’s AI system was woefully underdone when it first arrived and clearly lagged behind its rivals. First impressions matter, and if most people were left unconvinced by Apple Intelligence, ChatGPT might have suffered the knock-on effects among Apple’s customers.
Did ChatGPT lose out because Apple fans had to dive into the Settings app on their device, find the relevant section and laboriously wade through several steps in order to enable ChatGPT? Because Siri’s limitations dragged ChatGPT down with it? Or did users simply prefer to launch ChatGPT’s standalone app instead?
We don’t know the answer to that, at least not right now. But with Siri getting a glow-up under the Siri AI banner, it feels clear to me that Apple wants a fresh start for its AI efforts. Maybe things would have been different for OpenAI had it integrated with the more powerful Siri AI rather than the underbaked Apple Intelligence. But with Siri AI righting many of the wrongs of Apple Intelligence’s fudged launch, OpenAI may be left ruing what might have been.
