On September 5, Jim Cramer, a well-known commentator on the US financial channel CNBC, told investors on Wednesday that even if Apple does not have advanced AI technology of its own, it is still expected to succeed in the competition among large technology companies, because peers such as Google will pay for priority access to Apple's huge user base.


"Yesterday, Apple didn't have any leverage. Today, they have all the leverage," Cramer said. "It turns out that Apple has always had its own AI strategy: pay to participate. You pay them, not them paying you."

Wall Street has been pressuring Apple to unveil a strong AI strategy. They worry that as other technology companies invest billions in data centers and Nvidia chips to develop AI products, Apple could fall behind. So far this year, Apple's share price performance has lagged other members of the "Tech Seven", bettering only Tesla and ranking second to last among the seven companies.

But Cramer believes Apple's fortunes turned around on Tuesday. At the time, a U.S. federal judge ruled that Google didn't need to divest itself of its Chrome browser. The proposal is a remedy proposed by the U.S. Department of Justice after a court ruled in August 2024 that Google had an illegal monopoly in its core search business. This latest ruling means that Google can still pay Apple to become the default search engine on the iPhone. As of Wednesday's close, Apple's stock price rose 3.81%.

Cramer said Apple no longer has to worry about striking multibillion-dollar deals with large cloud providers or AI companies like Perplexity. Instead, big chatbot companies now have to compete for Apple's attention, which has more than 1 billion active iPhone users.

He also pointed out that eventually one AI platform will surpass the others in popularity. He hinted that the platform might be Gemini, given Google's existing partnership with Apple.

"There is no clear winner in the chatbot space right now, but if you can pay Apple a lot of money to make your product the default choice, there will always be someone willing to pay," Cramer said.

As of press time, Apple has not commented on this.