The new Siri ships today, and its brain belongs to Google
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "The new Siri ships today, and its brain belongs to Google")
The new Siri ships today, and its brain belongs to Google Photograph: (Apple)
Apple is rolling out iOS 27 with a redesigned Siri powered by Google's Gemini models, capable of longer natural conversations, translation and context-aware actions across Apple's own apps. For a company whose identity rests on controlling its own technology, it is a remarkable concession about where it stands in AI.
Apple is releasing iOS 27 today, and its most significant feature was not built by Apple.
The update brings a redesigned Siri powered by Google's Gemini models. Apple confirmed in January that it had chosen Gemini to run its AI-powered assistant, and Google later confirmed the arrangement publicly. The launch makes it real for hundreds of millions of iPhone users.
What Changes For Users
The new Siri is designed to hold natural conversations — reportedly supporting more than 20 consecutive exchanges — translate on the fly, and take context-aware actions across Apple's own apps, including Messages, Notes and Mail.
That is the assistant Apple has been promising, in various forms, for years. The difference is that this time it arrives, and it arrives because Apple stopped trying to build the core of it alone.
Why This Is Remarkable
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Apple's brand is built on vertical integration. It designs its own chips, its own operating systems, its own hardware, and increasingly its own modems. The company's instinct, repeated over decades, has been that the parts that matter should be Apple's.
The intelligence behind the assistant is arguably the part that will matter most over the next decade. Apple has outsourced it — to Google, its principal rival in mobile.
That is not a small decision made lightly. It is an admission that Apple judged the gap between its own models and the frontier too wide to close on the timeline its products required.
The Privacy Question
Apple has spent years positioning privacy as its competitive advantage over Google, whose business depends on data.
Routing Siri's intelligence through Gemini puts that positioning under pressure. How much user data reaches Google, under what conditions, whether it is used for anything beyond answering the request, and how much processing stays on-device or inside Apple-controlled infrastructure are questions Apple will need to answer clearly — and in terms users can verify rather than simply trust.
Apple's reputation gives it latitude here. It does not give it an exemption.
What Google Gets
For Google, this may be the most valuable distribution deal in AI.
Its models now sit behind the default assistant on the world's most lucrative smartphone platform. Every Siri request becomes, at some level, a Gemini interaction. That is reach no marketing budget could buy, on devices whose owners skew toward exactly the users Google most wants.
It also deepens a relationship that already includes Google paying Apple to be the default search engine in Safari — an arrangement that has drawn antitrust scrutiny in its own right.
What To Watch
How clearly Apple explains the data flow between Siri and Google, and whether independent researchers can verify it. Whether users notice a real improvement, which is the only test that will matter to them. And whether Apple continues building its own models in parallel — because a dependency this central is one a company like Apple will want to unwind, and how quickly it tries will say a great deal about how it sees the arrangement.
