Apple is replacing ChatGPT with its own AI model in the new Siri, ending a two-year partnership. The shift to on-device inference changes the privacy calculus and removes OpenAI's biggest distribution channel.
Apple is building its own AI assistant, and the partnership with ChatGPT looks increasingly temporary.
Two years ago, Apple and OpenAI were partners. The iPhone maker integrated ChatGPT into Siri as a stopgap while it developed its own large language model. Now the stopgap is expiring.
The new Siri, expected with iOS 19 later this year, runs on Apple's own LLM, not OpenAI's. The shift is visible in the architecture: Apple's model processes requests on-device for privacy, then queries its own cloud servers for harder questions. ChatGPT was the cloud fallback. That fallback is being phased out.
Apple's AI team has been hiring aggressively. The company poached Google's head of AI search in 2024 and has since added dozens of researchers focused on on-device inference. The goal is a Siri that can handle complex multi-step tasks – booking a table, editing a photo, drafting an email – without handing data to a third party.
The breakup matters for OpenAI. Apple's user base is roughly 1.5 billion active devices. Losing that distribution channel removes a major growth vector for ChatGPT subscriptions. It also signals that even the largest platform partners see AI as a core product, not a feature to outsource.
For Apple, the bet is that on-device AI can match cloud-based models on quality. Early benchmarks from Apple's research papers suggest its smaller models are competitive on common tasks like summarization and question-answering. The trade-off is latency: Apple's models run slower on older iPhones, which could frustrate users on devices more than three years old.
The timing is deliberate. Apple typically announces major Siri updates at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June. By then, the company expects to have its cloud inference infrastructure fully operational. Developers will get access to the new Siri API, which will let third-party apps hook into Apple's AI directly – no ChatGPT required.
What remains unclear is whether Apple's model can handle the long tail of weird questions that ChatGPT answers well. Siri's reputation for misunderstanding requests is well-earned. If Apple's new model stumbles on edge cases, users may notice the absence of the ChatGPT fallback.
Apple has not said when it will formally end the ChatGPT integration. The company declined to comment for this article.
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