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Apple ships Siri AI on Gemini, opens iOS 27 to Claude and ChatGPT via Extensions

At Tim Cook's farewell WWDC, Siri moved into the Dynamic Island and the iPhone became a routable surface for third-party agent models.

By Iris Holloway · Tools & frameworks ·

Apple unveiled Siri AI at WWDC 2026 on Sunday, rebuilding its assistant on a new AFM Cloud Pro tier of Apple Foundation Models on Cloud that runs Google Gemini Frontier models on Nvidia GPUs inside Google’s cloud, routed through Apple’s Private Cloud Compute. The choice of vendor is the headline: Apple is shipping its flagship AI surface on a competitor’s frontier model.

The assistant lives in the Dynamic Island, reachable by swipe, by side button, or by saying “Hey Siri,” with a standalone app on iPhone, iPad and Mac that preserves conversation history. Keynote demos walked through multi-step task chains across apps. The Apple Passwords app was singled out as an early in-house agent, using Apple Intelligence and Safari to “agentically take action on your behalf,” navigating to sites to rotate insecure credentials.

The bigger structural move is iOS 27’s Extensions framework, which lets developers route queries to OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, or Google Gemini. The iPhone is no longer Apple’s exclusive AI surface; it’s a routable substrate other agent vendors can plug into. Per MacRumors, citing Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, OpenAI is weighing legal action over the model switch.

In the post-keynote Q&A, Craig Federighi acknowledged the optics with a dry “you guys must have been at [Google] I/O,” framed Apple’s agents as “primarily request-based today,” and named Xcode the “best place” for agentic coding. The Foundation Models framework now accepts images as input.

Tim Cook confirmed he steps down in September, with hardware chief John Ternus taking over. Apple stock opened up roughly 2% and turned negative during the keynote.

That arc, a Gemini-powered Siri, a multi-vendor extensions layer, and a CEO transition, is the shape of an Apple choosing to be the integration layer rather than the model layer. The 2010s strategy of vertical AI ownership ended on stage today.

Sources