Apple is reportedly building its own ChatGPT-style search engine

For years, Apple took billions of dollars from Google just to keep its hands off the search business. That cozy arrangement might be coming to an end.

According to a report from Bloomberg on Sunday, Apple is internally working on a ChatGPT-like search experience designed to instantly generate answers for users.

The AKI team's new answer engine

Inside Cupertino, the project is being run by a group called the Answers, Knowledge and Information team, or AKI. Their mandate is to build in-house AI products for Apple devices.

The team is reportedly developing an answer engine that pulls live information across the web to respond to everyday queries. Apple might roll this out as a standalone app, or weave it directly into Siri, Spotlight, and Safari.

An Apple representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A hedge against a crumbling Google deal

While Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and xAI poured billions into training massive frontier models, Apple largely sat out the raw infrastructure race. Instead of building models from scratch, it opted to partner with OpenAI.

When the iPhone 16 arrived with Apple Intelligence, the reception was lukewarm. The suite of text generation, photo editing, and summaries felt half-baked to many, and the rollout has been noticeably slow. Earlier reports also suggested Apple even explored acquiring AI search startup Perplexity to get back in the game.

Apple never built its own rival search engine because Google paid handsomely not to face one. Google forks over roughly $20 billion every year to remain the default search engine across Apple hardware.

That golden goose is now in serious legal danger. The Department of Justice won its antitrust case against Google, with a federal judge ruling that Google holds an illegal search monopoly. As remedies are weighed, Apple has been blocked from participating, and reports warn Apple could lose up to $12.5 billion in annual revenue if the court restricts default search deals.

Why it matters

For everyday users, this means the iPhone search bar might finally skip the list of blue links and actually answer your questions. Getting direct summaries inside Spotlight or Siri without third-party chatbots would be a massive upgrade. But right now, it is purely an internal project, so don't expect to dump Google on your home screen this week.

For the broader tech landscape, this signals a massive shift in Apple's business model. Losing the Google revenue cushion means Apple has to build its own search destination, turning the world's most valuable hardware platform into an active combatant against Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity.

We think this is less of a visionary breakthrough and more of a forced defensive play. Apple isn't building an answer engine because it wants to, but because the courts are taking away its $20 billion safety net. The real risk here is execution. Building a reliable web index and keeping AI hallucinations in check is brutal work, and Apple's historical track record with Siri and Apple Maps proves that putting together a reliable search stack on the fly is much easier said than done.