Apple was one of the first companies to bring artificial intelligence to everyday users. When it launched Siri in 2011, it changed how people interacted with phones. You could talk to your iPhone, ask questions, and get quick answers. Siri made headlines and gave Apple an early lead in voice-based AI.
But more than a decade later, Siri feels outdated. While companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic built powerful AI models that can write, summarize, plan, and even reason, Apple stayed behind. Now, to catch up, Apple is reportedly turning to its biggest rival, Google.
According to Bloomberg, Apple is finalizing a deal with Google to use a custom version of Gemini, Google’s advanced AI model, to power the new Siri. This upgraded version of Siri is expected to launch in 2026.
The report says Apple will pay Google around $1 billion per year for access to Gemini. This AI model will run on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers and will handle important functions like summarization, planning, and task execution. These are the capabilities that make an assistant genuinely helpful and allow it to manage complex requests and perform actions inside apps.
Apple will still use some of its own in-house AI models for basic functions, but Gemini will play a major role behind the scenes.
Apple has some of the brightest engineers in the world, huge cash reserves, and access to massive amounts of hardware and software data. Yet, despite all of this, the company has failed to make a meaningful mark in the AI space.
Siri was introduced five years before Amazon’s Alexa and nearly a decade before ChatGPT. But while others built smarter and faster assistants powered by large language models, Siri stayed stuck with limited understanding and slow progress. Apple focused more on privacy and on-device processing, which kept user data safe but also limited how much Siri could learn and improve.
Now, instead of leading, Apple is depending on a rival’s AI system to modernize its own product.
Siri could have been the foundation for today’s AI assistants. Apple had the platform, the user base, and the brand trust. Yet, between 2011 and 2020, innovation around Siri was minimal. The assistant remained good for setting alarms or checking the weather, but not for real conversations or productivity tasks.
Meanwhile, Google Assistant evolved rapidly, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT showed what true conversational intelligence could do. Apple’s cautious approach to data use and privacy, while admirable, may have slowed its pace of innovation at a time when fast iteration defined AI progress.
Apple’s long-term plan is to eventually replace Gemini with its own AI model. Bloomberg reports that Apple is already working on a “one trillion parameter” AI model for cloud-based applications, which could debut in the next few years. If successful, this could bring Apple back into serious AI competition. But until then, the company’s reliance on Google shows how much ground it has to cover.
