Apple’s 2024 partnership with OpenAI was intended to mark the iPhone maker’s formal debut in generative AI. Two years on, that collaboration has soured into a power struggle. Bloomberg reports that OpenAI is now weighing legal action against Apple, alleging the company failed to honour the spirit of their agreement. While details of the alleged breach remain scarce, the move thrusts into the spotlight Apple’s longstanding doctrine of exerting tight control over technologies that touch its ecosystem—a stance that has historically left little room for equal-footing alliances. The rift underscores the tension between Apple’s reflexive instinct to guard the user experience through vertical integration and the open-ended nature of a partnership with a fast-moving AI lab. For Apple, generative AI was a concession to market pressure; for OpenAI, it was a channel to hundreds of millions of devices. That asymmetry now appears to have eroded trust, with legal threats signalling a breakdown that could reshape how platform owners and AI model developers negotiate access to consumers.