OpenAI has hired an outside law firm to prepare a lawsuit against Apple for breach of contract, with executives stating that the partnership has completely failed.

According to DynaBeat monitoring, OpenAI is reportedly preparing legal action against Apple over their two-year ChatGPT integration partnership. Bloomberg reported that OpenAI lawyers have recently teamed up with external law firms to draft various legal options and may soon send Apple a breach of contract notice.

At the core of the conflict is OpenAI's belief that Apple never fulfilled its deep integration commitments. When the two companies signed the agreement in June 2024, Apple likened this collaboration to the Safari search agreement with Google, which contributes billions of dollars in revenue annually to both parties. OpenAI expected the ChatGPT integration to generate billions of dollars in subscription revenue annually, a target that has not been met. An OpenAI executive bluntly stated that the partnership was a failure, accusing Apple of not making a sincere effort at the product level.

The problem lies in Apple's design of the integration. Users must actively mention ChatGPT in Siri to trigger OpenAI's service, with responses limited to a small window and far less informative than the ChatGPT standalone app. Internal OpenAI user research shows that Apple users overwhelmingly prefer to open the ChatGPT app directly rather than invoke it through Siri. OpenAI believes this half-hearted integration has actually harmed its brand.

To make matters worse, Apple is actively seeking to reduce its reliance on OpenAI. In terms of underlying AI models, Apple struck another deal with the Google Gemini team at the end of last year, worth around $1 billion annually. iOS 27 is set to be released on June 8th at WWDC, at which point Siri will be open to integration with competitors like Claude and Gemini. OpenAI stated that open competition itself was not the trigger for legal action; the issue is that Apple did not even fulfill its initial integration promise.

Another point of friction stems from hardware. OpenAI acquired a device company co-founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive last year, which is developing an iPhone alternative. OpenAI has been poaching key talent from Apple's hardware team at high salaries, further intensifying the strained relationship between the two parties.

Following the news, Apple's stock price briefly dropped by 1.2% to $295.38 during trading hours. OpenAI has not made a final decision and still hopes to resolve the issue out of court, with legal action not expected to commence until after the conclusion of the Musk case.