OpenAI Says Its ChatGPT Deal With Siri Dramatically Underperformed and Failed to Grow Users

OpenAI's big distribution win inside the iPhone barely moved the needle. In a new court filing, the company says ChatGPT inside Siri "dramatically underperformed" and was "persistently underperforming," according to MacRumors.

The admission is not a product announcement. It is a legal argument. OpenAI is fighting antitrust claims from Elon Musk's companies, which say the Apple deal locked rivals out of the market, and a flop makes that case much harder to win.

A feature most people never switched on

Apple added ChatGPT to Siri in December 2024. It was off by default, and users had to walk through a multistep opt-in before Siri would hand anything to OpenAI. OpenAI blames that friction for the weak uptake.

By January 2025, OpenAI said the integration was "off to a slow start" and cut its forecast for new logged-in weekly users from the partnership, 9to5Mac reports. The company had hoped for a "halo effect" that would push Apple Intelligence users toward paid ChatGPT plans.

That halo never showed up. OpenAI's expert, economist Catherine Tucker, calculated tiny foreclosure shares across several metrics, and OpenAI calls any foreclosure "indisputably de minimis." The actual figures are redacted, so the filing says Apple Intelligence usage was minimal without saying how minimal.

Apple said no to exclusivity

The hard fact buried in the filing is that OpenAI wanted a lock on Siri and did not get one. OpenAI asked Apple for a two-year exclusivity period. Apple refused, and the written agreement is explicitly non-exclusive, letting Apple plug in similar products.

Apple told OpenAI it planned to launch with one provider and add more later. That is what happened. The new Siri leans on Google's Gemini models, and Xcode now supports coding agents from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. The filing also mentions a March 2026 conversation between the two companies, with the details redacted.

Siri has had a rough run in court lately, from the $250 million Siri settlement over accidental recordings to this fight over who got access to it.

OpenAI now stands alone

Musk's companies dropped Apple from the lawsuit earlier this month, leaving OpenAI as the only defendant. OpenAI is asking the judge to throw out the xAI claims before a trial scheduled for January 2027.

"Underperformed" is OpenAI's own description, offered in a case where weakness helps its defense. Apple has not said anything publicly about how many people used the feature. For now, the most detailed account of ChatGPT in Siri comes from the company arguing it barely mattered.