Apple is set to underpin its new Siri with Google’s 1.2-trillion-parameter AI model, Bloomberg News reports Wednesday, powering a major voice-assistant overhaul.
Cupertino is leaning on Alphabet’s tech to rebuild Siri from the ground up, paving the way for a wave of new features in 2026.
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
The Google model’s 1.2 trillion parameters — a measure of the AI software’s complexity — would dwarf the level of Apple’s current models… The hope is to use the technology as an interim solution until Apple’s own models are powerful enough.
Following an extensive evaluation period, the two companies are now finalizing an agreement that would see Apple pay roughly $1 billion annually for access to Google’s technology, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. The new Siri is on track for next spring…
Known internally as Glenwood, the effort to fix Siri with a third-party model has been led by Vision Pro headset creator Mike Rockwell and software engineering chief Craig Federighi. The new voice assistant itself, planned for iOS 26.4, is code-named Linwood.
The model will run on Apple’s own Private Cloud Compute servers, ensuring that user data remains walled off from Google’s infrastructure. Apple has already allocated AI server hardware to help power the model.
While the partnership is substantial, it’s unlikely to be promoted publicly. Apple will treat Google as a behind-the-scenes technology supplier instead… [F]or Apple, the move marks an acknowledgment that it has fallen behind in AI — and is now willing to rely on outside technology to catch up.
Apple still doesn’t want to use Gemini as a long-term solution. Despite the company bleeding AI talent — including the head of its models team — management intends to keep developing new AI technology and hopes to eventually replace Gemini with an in-house solution, the people said.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote earlier this week, Apple should follow our advice from April:
With Siri now basically holding a full house of negative associations built up over years of neglect, incompetence, and empty promises, perhaps, if Apple actually manages to fix Siri this time around (a big IF; we’ve heard it all before), a rebrand might be useful. Kill off Siri and introduce something new – since it will actually finally be new – in order to allow it to take off on its own without the weighty baggage of the Siri name.
Then there’s the issue that Google’s Gemini is arguably the third-best of the top three, trailing xAI’s Grok and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
If you’re going to with an external AI partner, why not choose the smartest one? We find xAI’s Grok to be more accurate and useful than Google’s Gemini, ChatGPT, and the rest. – MacDailyNews, July 21, 2025
The issues are: Google’s Gemini is not the best and everyone knows it, Google has a poor reputation for privacy that will tarnish Apple’s, and Google, hello, ripped off the iPhone with Android. Enough with the Google, Apple! – MacDailyNews, July 22, 2025
Apple will likely keep Siri’s Google Gemini underpinnings very secret for many reasons, including:
Google Gemini? Why not just get a Samsung Galaxy phone which already integrates Google’s Gemini AI as a core component of their AI-powered features?
Google Gemini on an iPhone offers precious little differentiation from Samsung, the chief iPhone knockoff peddler. – MacDailyNews, August 22, 2025
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