Apple is on pace to surpass $1 billion in artificial-intelligence revenue this year, a tidy sum that demonstrates the company’s AI advantage even as it struggles to deliver an AI strategy of its own.
Its Siri chatbot is still dumb by modern AI standards, but Apple has a dominant position making devices, which means users typically pay the App Store tax, roughly 30% of subscription fees in the first year and 15% a year thereafter.
Generative AI apps paid Apple nearly $900 million in App Store fees in 2025, according to the analysis firm AppMagic, with three-fourths of the revenue coming from ChatGPT.
Apple's revenue from GenAI apps rose from about $35 million in January 2025 to a high of $101 million in August, but sales have fallen from their peak due to declining ChatGPT downloads.
Despite the small proportion of Apple's total sales, GenAI apps are a growth driver for Apple’s services business, which investors have focused on in recent years.
Apple's AI plan runs counter to strategies of competitors that are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on chips and data centers to build frontier large language models.
Apple is spending a fraction of that, aiming instead to use all the personal information people store on their iPhones together with chips it designs itself to power an on-device AI strategy.
