Labs

Apple bets Siri
on a 1.2T-parameter
Gemini, in Cook's
last WWDC

At his final keynote as CEO, Tim Cook unveiled Siri AI — a ground-up rebuild running on a custom Google model Apple will pay roughly $1 billion a year for — alongside iOS 27, a standalone Siri app, and developer betas across six platforms.

By Casey Vanderhoof Frontier labs correspondent · June 8, 2026

Apple will pay Google roughly $1 billion a year to run Siri on a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter Gemini variant, the centerpiece of a ground-up assistant rebuild that Tim Cook unveiled Monday in what will be his final WWDC keynote as CEO. The arrangement, first reported by Bloomberg and confirmed on stage in Cupertino, ends a two-year stretch in which Apple Intelligence shipped mostly as a routing layer and quietly handed harder queries to ChatGPT. Siri now answers directly, and the model behind it’s a rival’s.

The new product is called Siri AI, and Apple framed the underlying stack, Apple Foundation Models on Cloud, as a peer to its partner’s own work: AFM Cloud Pro, the flagship tier, is “similar in quality to Gemini Frontier models,” per Apple’s own framing. The assistant gets a dedicated chatbot app, a “Search or Ask” gesture, Dynamic Island integration, and conversation history. On the Mac it’s baked into Spotlight. A demo had the screenshot tool pulling band sets off a festival schedule and dropping them into Calendar.

Then the agentic layer. The Passwords app gets an agent that “agentically takes action on your behalf” by rotating credentials. Messages gets reply suggestions, Phone pulls context mid-call, Safari manages tabs. The App Store grows an Extensions section where users can swap in third-party chatbots, with Claude and Gemini named as launch partners.

Device requirements are narrow: iPhone 16, iPhone 15 Pro, and M1-or-later iPads and Macs. The geographic exclusions are narrower still in the wrong direction. Siri AI won’t ship in the EU on iOS 27 or iPadOS 27 at launch, with Apple stating that “EU regulators did not accept any of Apple’s proposed solutions” under the Digital Markets Act. China is also on the exclusion list.

The financial framing matters. Apple has spent a decade selling on-device intelligence and privacy as the architectural argument against the hyperscalers. It’s now renting frontier capability from Google at roughly a billion a year, while shares opened up about 2% on the news. The market, which spent 2025 marking Apple down for falling behind, read the capitulation as the right call. Nvidia’s run made the build-versus-rent math impossible to ignore.

Developer betas of all six platforms (iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS Golden Gate, visionOS 27, watchOS 27, and the rest) shipped the same day. John Ternus, the hardware engineering chief who takes over September 1, was in the room the night before but didn’t appear on stage. Cook, per CNBC’s reporters, wiped a tear at the close.

The succession is legible enough. So is the deal underneath it: Apple’s last great CEO handed his successor a Siri that finally works, and a dependency on Google to keep it working.

Sources