Apple’s more personalized, Apple Intelligence-powered Siri may not be ready for prime time, but that hasn’t stopped Apple from making plenty from Artificial Intelligence while it’s working on Siri, as the company’s in-app purchase commissions from AI app is expected to exceed $1 billion in 2026.
The Wall Street Journal reports that in January 2025, Apple took in $35 million in App Store fees from generative AI apps. By August 2025, it was $101 million, for an estimated $900 million for the year. It is now predicted that Apple’s take from generative AI apps will reach $1 billion for 2026. For 2025, 75% of the earnings came from ChatGPT. The next closest in App Store fees was Grok, which accounted for 5%.
While the ChatGPT and Grok apps are free to download, Apple gets a cut of the action from in-app sign ups for those two services.
Plus, while other companies, like Microsoft and Google, are spending heavily on developing servers and data center, while Apple is working to have Apple Intelligence work on-device. Apple has made deals with Google and ChatGPT, allowing them to spend much less on AI than other firms.
According to the report, Apple’s spending has averaged around $2 billion to $4 billion annually since 2020. By comparison, Amazon’s AI spending has rapidly increased from about $4 billion in 2020 to more than $40 billion so far in 2026.
