When Apple opens its developer conference on June 8, the company will make an announcement that sounds like a feature update: Siri, now with third-party AI. The actual story is harder to miss once you see it. Apple is dismantling the exclusive arrangement that Elon Musk's xAI sued over, and it is doing so not by betting on its own models but by becoming a distribution channel for its rivals — while collecting a commission on whatever runs through Siri.
The details are coming via a Extensions panel inside iOS 27's Settings, sitting inside what Apple calls the Apple Intelligence and Siri section, according to MacRumors. Users will be able to pick which AI service they want Siri to use — Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, or OpenAI's ChatGPT — and switch between them the same way they choose a default browser. OpenAI will no longer have an exclusive partnership; it will have an API slot, same as everyone else.
That is the arrangement xAI argued was anticompetitive. In August 2025, xAI filed an antitrust lawsuit claiming Apple and OpenAI had "locked up markets to maintain their monopolies and prevent innovators like X and xAI from competing." A US judge allowed the case to proceed in November, according to Reuters. Now the exclusive deal that was the subject of that suit is being dissolved before the case reaches trial. Whether that sharpens xAI's argument — Apple admitting the arrangement was wrong — or undercuts it — problem solved, no remedy needed — is a question for the lawyers.
Apple has simultaneously deepened its dependence on Google in the process. According to Reuters, Apple could be paying Google roughly $1 billion per year as part of a multi-year Gemini deal. The Information reported that the arrangement also gives Apple access to Google's technology for training its own smaller models — meaning Apple is paying to learn from the competitor it is simultaneously distributing. That is a complicated place to be for a company that once tried to build everything in-house.
The financial logic is not hard to follow. An Entrepreneur report noted that Apple is on track to generate more than $1 billion from rival AI applications on the App Store in 2026, with ChatGPT accounting for roughly 75 percent of current generative AI commission revenue. The standard App Store commission — 30 percent in the first year of a subscription, 15 percent thereafter — applies regardless of which AI service users choose. If you pay Gemini directly through Apple's billing system, Apple takes a cut. If you use Claude the same way, Apple takes a cut. The exclusive OpenAI deal was worth something to Apple in distribution; the open model is worth more, because it means every AI subscription flowing through iOS is a revenue event for Apple.
That is the bet. Apple is not trying to win the AI model wars. It is trying to own the settlement layer — the commission on every AI interaction that happens on iOS, regardless of which model is underneath. Siri is the tap; the Extensions panel is the spigot; the App Store billing infrastructure is the meter.
Bloomberg reported that Apple is also testing a standalone Siri app and a new Ask Siri feature as part of the iOS 27 overhaul — part of a broader push to treat Siri as a product with its own identity, not just a voice assistant buried inside Settings. That reframing matters: a standalone Siri app is an AI routing interface, not a Siri-branded chatbot. Apple is positioning the shell to be model-agnostic by design.
The xAI lawsuit is not the only pressure on the arrangement. The exclusive OpenAI deal was also unusual in a market where every major platform is racing to offer users a choice of models. Google has Gemini in Android. Microsoft has Copilot. Amazon has its own Alexa AI layer. An exclusive arrangement with one AI provider was increasingly a competitive liability for Apple — it meant iOS users who wanted to use Claude or Gemini had no native path to do so. Opening the stack removes that friction and, as a side effect, eliminates the antitrust problem.
Whether Apple's Gemini deal produces AI models that can close the gap with the frontier remains an open question. Paying $1 billion a year for training data and distribution access is not the same as building a foundation model practice from scratch. The company is learning fast — The Information's reporting suggests Apple's own AI models are being trained on Gemini — but the models that emerge from that process are unknown. Apple has not shipped a consumer AI product it can genuinely call its own yet.
What Apple has is a billing relationship with every user of its devices. The exclusive deal with OpenAI was a first move in the AI era. The open model is a more profitable one — provided the models people choose to run are good enough to keep them inside the Apple ecosystem. If Gemini and Claude improve fast enough, Apple wins twice: once as distributor and once as a company using their technology to build its own. If they plateau, Apple is still collecting commissions on whatever fills the gap.
