Apple Just Picked Google Over OpenAI for Siri's AI Brain
Apple and Google announced a multiyear partnership to bring Gemini-powered AI to Siri. For Apple, it's an admission that building its own foundation models isn't working. For Google, it's another default-search-deal-sized win.
After months of speculation about who would power Apple’s AI ambitions - OpenAI? Anthropic? - the answer is Google. Apple and Google announced a multiyear partnership this week that will see Gemini power a more personalized version of Siri, coming sometime in 2026.
The joint statement: “Apple determined that Google’s AI technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and is excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for Apple users.”
What Apple is actually admitting
The Morningstar analysts put it well: “From Apple’s perspective, it’s certainly a win if you think about the pain that they’ve had in their AI strategy up to this point.” Apple over-promised on Apple Intelligence in summer 2024 and under-delivered. Siri updates that were announced last year still haven’t shipped. The AI chief was replaced. The summaries were wrong.
Instead of continuing to pretend they could build frontier models in-house, Apple made the pragmatic call: find the best provider, partner with them, focus on user experience and hardware integration.
That’s a reasonable strategy. But it’s also an admission. Apple Intelligence was supposed to be Apple’s differentiator. Now the differentiator is Google’s models running on Apple’s hardware with Apple’s privacy layer on top.
Google wins again
For Google, this is the Search deal all over again. Back in the day, Google paid Apple up to $20 billion per year to be the default search engine on Safari. That deal was so valuable it became a central exhibit in the US antitrust case against Google.
The Apple-Gemini deal is smaller - reports suggest around $1 billion per year - but it’s arguably more strategically important. Every iPhone user who activates the new Siri gets a Gemini-powered experience. That cements Google as the de facto AI model for mainstream consumers in a way that the API business never could.
As one analyst put it: Google becomes “a de facto option as an AI model” in the consumer’s mind. Not just in Search. In the assistant that runs on a billion devices.
The privacy angle
Apple was careful to emphasise Private Cloud Compute - the architecture where AI processing happens on Apple’s own servers, with Apple’s privacy guarantees. The deal will use Gemini instances on Apple’s own infrastructure, not raw Google API calls routed through Google’s cloud.
That’s Apple’s differentiator even when using Google models. The privacy story stays intact. Your prompts don’t go to Google’s servers. They go to Apple’s servers, which use Google’s models under the hood. It’s a way to have Google’s AI quality while preserving Apple’s privacy pitch.
Whether users will actually notice the difference is another question.
The antitrust footnote
It’s worth noting this deal comes after the government tried - and largely failed - to prevent Google from doing exactly this kind of default-placement deal. The Search antitrust remedy didn’t include prohibitions on AI partnership deals. So Apple’s move is, in some sense, a test case for whether Google can recreate the Search default-deal dynamic in AI.
Cornell professor James Grimmelmann: “It’s possible that some years from now Google could be facing a new antitrust trial for being the AI provider to Apple in the same way that it was facing antitrust scrutiny for being the search provider.”
The competitive picture
OpenAI had reportedly been in the running too. The question now is what OpenAI does with that real estate on iPhones - it reportedly had a deal to put ChatGPT into Siri as an option, which would give Apple an alternative if Gemini underperforms.
But the headline win is Google’s: they didn’t just protect Search. They expanded into the most visible consumer AI integration in the world.
Source: The Verge