Apple Built the New Siri on Google Gemini After Two Years of Delays

Apple unveiled a rebuilt Siri at WWDC 2026 on Monday, backed by a roughly $1 billion-per-year deal with Google and scheduled to ship with iOS 27 in September. The keynote, the last Tim Cook will deliver as chief executive before John Ternus takes over September 1, introduced a chat mode, personal context access to on-device data, a standalone Siri app, and a framework letting users swap in Claude or ChatGPT as their preferred AI engine.

The features on stage Monday are the ones Apple demonstrated at WWDC 2024, promised for iOS 18, delayed in March 2025, and then settled over in a $250 million false-advertising suit weeks before this conference opened.

From the 2024 Demo to a $250 Million Settlement

The Features That Never Arrived

Apple’s 2024 developer conference produced a memorable demo. The assistant pulled a mom’s flight arrival time from an email, surfaced a lunch plan from a text thread, and mapped driving time to the restaurant, all within Siri, without the user touching another app. The demo ran before Apple’s developer audience in June 2024; the feature never shipped.

The difficulty was structural. Apple’s privacy model deliberately keeps app data isolated from other apps and from Apple itself. Those email threads and text messages that made the demo compelling sit inside the exact sandbox Apple had spent years marketing as a security feature. Threading Siri through that data without breaking the privacy architecture the company had built took longer than the keynote implied.

By March 2025, Apple acknowledged that its more personalized Siri capabilities had slipped past the iOS 18 cycle, promising rollout “in the coming year.” Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, had described the company’s philosophy to The Wall Street Journal at the time: “let’s try to get each piece right and release it when it’s ready.” Reuters then reported those same features were pushed to 2026 altogether. Tim Cook told investors on an earnings call: “We look forward to bringing a more personalized Siri to users coming this year.” The AI notification summaries that did ship in iOS 18.1 had to be pulled in the iOS 18.3 beta after the system regularly garbled news headlines; Apple restored them in the public iOS 18.3 release with an error-warning label.

A Settlement Before the Conference

A U.S. federal court granted preliminary approval on May 5 to a settlement between Apple and iPhone buyers who accused the company of false advertising after Siri capabilities promoted during the iPhone 16 launch in September 2024 remained unavailable for close to two years. Apple’s advertising campaign for the iPhone 16 had shown Siri accessing personal photos, messages, and emails to perform tasks buyers couldn’t use on their devices. The settlement amount is $250 million. Owners of an iPhone 15 Pro, 15 Pro Max, or any iPhone 16 model purchased between June 10, 2024, and March 29, 2025, can file claims; payouts run from $25 to as much as $95 per device if claim volume stays low. Claim submissions are expected to open within 45 days of the May 5 approval. Apple denied wrongdoing. A separate suit filed by South Korea’s National Pension Service, which contends the AI delays caused billions in stock-market losses, remains active.

Google’s Trillion-Parameter Engine

The Architecture Under the Deal

Apple and Google announced the partnership on January 12, 2026. The multi-year agreement, as reported by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and publicly confirmed by Google at Google I/O 2026 in May, puts Apple’s annual cost at roughly $1 billion. A first wave of Gemini-backed features rolled out with iOS 26.5 in May before this week’s keynote; the full conversational Siri arrives with iOS 27 in September.

The licensed model is a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter version of Gemini using a mixture-of-experts (MoE, an architecture that activates only a relevant subset of parameters per query) design, approximately eight times larger than the biggest cloud model Apple had assembled on its own. The MoE structure reduces the compute activated per query, which Apple says keeps response latency competitive on questions requiring the model’s full knowledge capacity. Queries exceeding the capacity of the roughly 3-billion-parameter on-device model route to Private Cloud Compute (PCC, Apple’s hardware-isolated server infrastructure), not to Google’s data centers. Those PCC servers use a stateless, ephemeral design: no user data is retained or logged after a query resolves, and requests are never used to train future Google models. The full licensing terms haven’t been disclosed.

Why Apple Picked a Partner

Craig Federighi had consistently described Apple Intelligence as a system built around on-device processing and user privacy. The Gemini contract covers a model eight times beyond what Apple assembled independently. The original Apple-Google financial relationship ran the other way: Google paid Apple billions annually to be the default iPhone search engine, an arrangement a U.S. federal court ruled in 2024 had illegally maintained Google’s search monopoly. Apple and Google have offered somewhat different public descriptions of the arrangement, with Apple emphasizing that models run on PCC and Google describing itself as a preferred cloud provider.

Patrick Moorhead, founder of tech consulting firm Moor Insights & Strategy, framed the data challenge underlying any AI assistant’s quality at the conference.

AI is all about data, because data is what creates context and what creates better results.

Apple’s calculation is that the personal context already on every iPhone (emails, messages, calendar events, photos) gives Siri a home-field advantage that general-purpose chatbots can’t replicate without the same access. That logic extends to Apple’s broader hardware roadmap. Camera-equipped AirPods in advanced internal prototyping, per Bloomberg’s May 2026 report, would pipe visual context through the same PCC infrastructure, part of Apple’s push to integrate AI into its wearable hardware.

What iOS 27 Ships in September

The rebuilt Siri arrives as a standalone app with an iMessage-style chat interface and persistent conversation history synced via iCloud. A center swipe on the iPhone surfaces a microphone toggle alongside options to route queries to Siri, ChatGPT, or Google Gemini; that navigation change moves Notification Center to a left swipe and keeps Control Center on the right. Apple is embedding an “Ask Siri” button inside its first-party apps so users can send content from Mail, Messages, or Notes directly to the assistant. Conversation auto-delete timers (30 days, one year, or indefinitely) ship with the app. The “Hey Siri” wake word and Side button activation stay active for users who prefer them.

The full feature set expected in September:

• Chat mode: persistent, multi-turn conversation with history synced via iCloud, launched via center swipe
• Personal context: on-device access to emails, messages, calendar events, photos, and files
• Screen awareness: Siri reads the active screen and executes chained actions across apps without manual navigation
• File attachments: PDFs, spreadsheets, and documents submitted to the assistant for analysis
• Visual Intelligence in Camera: moved from the Camera Control button to a dedicated camera mode, using Google Image Search for object identification
• macOS 27 parity: chatbot capabilities and personal context access on Mac, with a standalone Siri app and improved cross-app integration

Full AI capabilities require an iPhone 15 Pro or newer with an A17 Pro chip and 8GB of RAM. iOS 27 drops support for the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, iPhone 11 Pro Max, and the second-generation iPhone SE. Some reports indicate a possible waitlist for the most advanced features at initial launch. Developer betas began distributing today. Public betas follow in July.

The AI Marketplace Inside Siri

iOS 27 ships an Extensions framework that opens Siri and other Apple Intelligence features to third-party AI models. Apple describes Extensions, per a 9to5Mac report citing Bloomberg, as letting users “access generative AI capabilities from installed apps on demand, through Apple Intelligence features such as Siri, Writing Tools, Image Playground and more.” A provider like Anthropic or OpenAI adds Extensions support to its existing iPhone app; any user with that app installed can then designate it as the preferred AI engine. The Information reported that Apple also plans to allow AI agents to operate across the App Store platform broadly, handling tasks like booking reservations, editing documents, or managing smart home devices on a user’s behalf.

Developers Apple recognized at the Apple Design Awards 2026 earlier this week gain a new distribution channel from Monday’s announcements: a Siri Extension places a specialized AI capability directly in front of iPhone users through the platform’s default interaction layer without competing for App Store discovery. Gemini holds the native position in that layer, backed by Apple’s infrastructure and the documented PCC protections. Claude and ChatGPT enter as user-installed additions.

Cook’s Last Keynote, Ternus’s First Bet

Monday’s keynote was Tim Cook’s last as CEO. He announced on April 20 that he would step down September 1, with John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, confirmed as his successor. That calendar puts the iOS 27 general release in Ternus’s first two weeks in the role.

Apple shares are up roughly 50% over the past year, behind Alphabet’s roughly 120% gain driven by Gemini’s commercial deployment across Google’s own products. Microsoft fell about 7%, with markets judging it has trailed rivals including Anthropic despite the close OpenAI relationship. Hundreds of millions of iPhone users installed ChatGPT and Claude while the personalized Siri worked through engineering delays and a settlement hearing.

Ternus spent more than a decade as Apple’s head of hardware engineering, overseeing the transition from Intel to Apple Silicon that launched with the M1 chip in 2020. The AI infrastructure beneath the rebuilt Siri (the A-series chips, the PCC servers, the M-series hardware running Apple’s cloud models) was built under his engineering oversight. An iPhone 18 is expected alongside iOS 27 in September, and an iPhone Fold is also rumored for the fall. WWDC 2026 was software-only; no hardware was announced, with M5 Mac Studio and Mac mini refreshes, a HomePod mini update, and an Apple TV revision all expected later in the year.

Developer betas for iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 are available to registered Apple developers through WWDC26 today. The public launch is expected around September 14.

Cook won’t be CEO when it ships.