Apple reportedly getting ChatGPT access for free

Apple is apparently getting access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT in iOS 18 for free.

One of the big items of news to emerge from Apple’s WWDC event this week has been that iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia will be able to utilise the ChatGPT AI assistant for Siri queries.

You might have expected that access to the world’s hottest LLM would come at a premium price, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. According to a new Bloomberg report from well informed journalist Mark Gurman, Apple isn’t paying ChatGPT anything.

Apparently, Apple has been able to convince OpenAI that the greatest payment it could give right now is to place its AI chatbot and branding in front of hundreds of millions of iPhone users. Apple is offering ChatGPT results to its customers without any charge to the user.

In future, the report claims that Apple intends to cut a series of revenue-sharing deals with AI companies, meaning Apple would take a cut from any monetised chatbot results obtained through Apple platforms, in a similar way to how it takes a slice of all App Store app payments.

Apple is said to be in talks with Google over possible Gemini AI integration in future iterations of Siri, as well as Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot.

When iOS 18 launches later this year with Apple Intelligence, Siri will be able to use ChatGPT to do things like create a menu for dinner based on the ingredients in your fridge, or to provide advice on which colour to paint your wall based on an image of your front room.