Apple ships Siri AI on Google Gemini, concedes 'early days' on agents

Tim Cook's final WWDC unveils a Gemini-backed Siri, a Passwords agent, and Siri Extensions for Claude and ChatGPT — but Federighi admits long-horizon agents are still ahead.

Apple’s redesigned Siri, two years late and rebuilt as a standalone app, will ship this fall running on Apple Foundation Models on Cloud, an in-house model stack that Apple confirmed at WWDC 2026 is built in collaboration with Google. The top tier, AFM Cloud Pro, runs on Nvidia GPUs inside Google’s cloud and was described onstage as “similar in quality to Gemini Frontier models.” PYMNTS read the arrangement as a structural concession: Apple couldn’t close the capability gap on its own timeline.

Siri AI lands in developer beta Monday and rolls out to consumers in the fall across iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS Golden Gate. Not in Europe or China at launch, per the company’s regulatory citation.

The most concrete agent Apple actually shipped isn’t Siri. It’s Passwords, which now visits websites through Safari to “agentically take action on your behalf” by rotating insecure credentials. iOS 27 also opens Siri Extensions to Claude and ChatGPT, and exposes the foundation models framework to developers with image inputs and custom server models. The walled garden gets a side door.

In a post-keynote press briefing, SVP Craig Federighi was unusually candid. “I think it’s very early days in getting to those kinds of helpful long-horizon agent tasks, but we’re all building on agentic architectures at this point,” he told reporters. He said Apple’s own engineers are using agentic coding tools, and named Xcode as “the best place” for that work.

Onstage, Federighi had taken a swipe at the competition: “Some appear to be racing forward, seemingly pursuing AI for the sake of AI, without clear regard to the people, all of us, that it’s ultimately meant to serve.”

The irony underlines itself. Apple promised the Siri overhaul in 2024 and is shipping it in 2026 on a rival’s frontier model. Tim Cook closed his final WWDC as CEO ahead of a September step-down, handing over a company that has just publicly outsourced the layer it once defined itself by owning.

Apple ships Siri AI on Google Gemini, concedes 'early days' on agents

Sources