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Court documents reveal OpenAI is coming for your iPhone

If you’re Apple, this is the kind of internal document that you knew existed, but still hits hard. Especially in the middle of a global antitrust reckoning and internal… whatever the heck is going on in there.

A recently unsealed OpenAI file outlines the company’s ambitions for ChatGPT. In short? They’re coming for Siri with everything they’ve got.

The super-assistant

Thanks to the DOJ’s ongoing case against Google, we now have a rare look at how OpenAI views its competition, and where it sees ChatGPT heading next.

The document (via The Verge), titled “ChatGPT: H1 2025 Strategy” and dated late 2024, describes a significant evolution of OpenAI’s LLM to turn it into a “super-assistant”:

“What exactly is a super-assistant? It’s an intelligent entity with T-shaped skills. It’s an entity because it’s personalized to you and available anywhere you go — including chatgpt.com, our native apps, phone, email, or third-party surfaces like Siri. It’s T-shaped because it has broad skills for daily tasks that are tedious, and deep expertise for tasks that most people find impossible (starting with coding). The broad part is all about making life easier: answering a question, finding a home, contacting a lawyer, joining a gym, planning vacations, buying gifts, managing calendars, keeping track of todos, sending emails. The deep part is about [REDACTED] — though as we reach less engaged users, we’ll need to keep an eye on [REDACTED].”

Contrary to Apple, OpenAI’s plan seems on track

If you have been keeping up with ChatGPT’s evolution, you know that this is exactly what OpenAI has been doing in H1 2025. From the recent rollout of cross-chat memory, to Operator, which gives ChatGPT agentic capabilities to directly manipulate platforms and interfaces, it’s all there.

In a nutshell, the document paints a future where ChatGPT isn’t just something you open in a browser or in an app, but something that’s always with you, always listening, and always ready to help. You know, like Siri (even with its ChaGPT integration) was supposed to be:

“One that knows you, understands what you care about, and helps with any task that a smart, trustworthy, emotionally intelligent person with a computer could do.”

The plan hinges on OpenAI’s new generation of models, combined with agentic tools for web browsing, code writing, and device control. It doesn’t specifically mention hardware, which is where the recently announced bombshell Jony Ive partnership would come in, but you know this is in there somewhere, under all that redaction.

The Siri partnership is not enough

However, the biggest competitive threat to Apple isn’t just how the technology works, but where.

Top comment by Shut down the devil sound

Liked by 6 people

OpenAI is theft on the largest scale humanity has ever seen. You don't get to digitally scrape the entirety of human generated internet content, and then charge everyone for accessing THEIR OWN MATERIAL that you used for training. This needs to end now. If there was any justice in this world, the courts would shut this down with an injunction YESTERDAY.

Doesn't anyone find it odd that Napster was shut down due to a few thousand college kids stealing 3 megabyte Britney Spears MP3s files...but this is just fine and dandy, nothing illegal going on here?! Humanity is cooked.

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OpenAI makes it clear that they want to challenge gatekeepers, specifically naming “powerful incumbents who will leverage their distribution to advantage their own products”. ChatGPT has been Siri’s fallback for almost a year now, but OpenAI obviously wants more:

“Real choice drives competition and benefits everyone. Users should be able to pick their AI assistant. If you’re on iOS, Android, or Windows, you should be able to set ChatGPT as your default. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta shouldn’t push their own AIs without giving users fair alternatives. The same goes for search engines: Google, Apple, Microsoft should offer users a choice for their default search engine and make their underlying indexes accessible to AI assistants, including ChatGPT.”

Their antitrust pitch to regulators seems pretty ready to go.

Meanwhile, Apple’s own AI roadmap is all over the place. Siri leadership was recently moved under Vision Pro executive Mike Rockwell, while Robby Walker, who previously ran Siri, is now leading a new internal project called “Knowledge.” That initiative is said to be Apple’s answer to ChatGPT. However, as Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman’s reported, “it’s already been plagued by some of the same problems that delayed the Siri overhaul.“

Hey Siri, what now?

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Avatar for Marcus Mendes Marcus Mendes

Marcus Mendes is a Brazilian tech podcaster and journalist who has been closely following Apple since the mid-2000s.

He began covering Apple news in Brazilian media in 2012 and later broadened his focus to the wider tech industry, hosting a daily podcast for seven years.