Apple starts collecting its 30% AI tax

You burn hundreds of millions of dollars training frontier models, and someone else takes a 30% cut just for letting your users enter their credit card numbers.

That is the reality OpenAI just walked into on iOS. Late last week, OpenAI finally launched an official iPhone app for ChatGPT. It instantly soared to the top of the App Store free charts, with Apple even crowning it a "must-have" under its Essentials banner.

Users can grab it for free, but if they want ChatGPT Plus for $20 a month to get faster responses and new features, OpenAI routes them straight through Apple's in-app purchasing engine. As analysts at Bernstein put it bluntly to investors, Apple is getting its 30% tax.

The best tollbooth in tech

While OpenAI doesn't share its financials, back in February analysts estimated ChatGPT already had over 100 million monthly active users.

To see how absurd the math gets, consider a hypothetical: if 5 million iOS users sign up for ChatGPT Plus, that generates $1.2 billion in annual revenue. Apple's cut of that would be $360 million a year, collected without training a single model or buying an H100.

Meanwhile, Apple is playing the role of the cautious skeptic. On Apple's latest earnings call, Tim Cook said the company would "weave" AI into products deliberately, noting there are "a number of issues that need to be sorted." The Wall Street Journal also reported that Apple told staff to restrict their use of ChatGPT over privacy and corporate data leaks.

Yet none of those privacy concerns stopped Apple from hosting the app and pocketing the fees. Apple's services division, which houses App Store revenue, just hit a record quarterly high of over $20 billion, serving as the company's biggest growth engine as iPhone sales cool.

Why OpenAI didn't fight back

Apple recently scored a major win against Epic Games in their high-profile antitrust battle. The judge did rule that developers could bypass Apple's commission by linking out to the web for purchases, but OpenAI opted against that path.

Directing mobile users to a web browser introduces checkout friction that kills conversion rates. OpenAI simply swallowed the 30% bite in exchange for frictionless, one-tap Apple Pay signups.

Bloomberg has reported that Apple will soon support alternative app stores in the European Union to comply with incoming regulations. Everywhere else, the walled garden remains completely intact.

Why it matters

For users, subscribing inside the iOS app is as seamless as it gets. But if you would rather your entire $20 go to OpenAI's server compute instead of Apple's bottom line, subscribing through a browser remains the smarter play.

For the AI industry, this is a harsh wake-up call about platform distribution. OpenAI and Microsoft may be dominating the frontier AI headlines, but Apple controls the glass in everyone's pocket. Apple does not even need to win the foundation model race; it can simply tax the winners and use those massive windfalls to fund its own deliberate rollout.

We think this playbook is commercially brilliant, but ethically and regulatorily fragile. Warning your own staff away from a technology while branding it an App Store "essential" and pocketing hundreds of millions in commissions looks hypocritical. As antitrust scrutiny heats up across Europe and the US, taxing other people's AI revolutions might be the catalyst that finally breaks the App Store's grip.