Labs

Apple Bets Siri
on a $1B-a-Year
Custom Gemini, Opens
iOS 27 to
Claude and ChatGPT

At what is widely expected to be Tim Cook's final WWDC keynote as CEO, Apple is unveiling a rebuilt Siri running on a 1.2-trillion-parameter custom Google Gemini model, alongside an Extensions framework that lets users swap in Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini system-wide.

By Casey Vanderhoof Frontier labs correspondent · June 8, 2026

Apple will walk on stage at 10:00 a.m. Pacific today and concede, in product form, that it lost the foundation-model race. The rebuilt Siri unveiled at WWDC 2026 runs on a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter variant of Google’s Gemini, an arrangement Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports is costing Apple roughly $1 billion a year. It’s the most expensive admission in the company’s recent history, and it’s being delivered at what Tom’s Guide and others widely expect to be Tim Cook’s final WWDC keynote as CEO.

The framing matters. Apple and Google jointly announced on January 12 that the next generation of Apple Foundation Models would be built on this Gemini variant, per 9to5Mac. The official posture is hybrid: TechCrunch reports that cloud-bound Siri queries route to Gemini while on-device models handle privacy-sensitive tasks. That’s the line. The substance is that Apple’s flagship assistant now thinks with someone else’s weights.

The second announcement is, in a way, the more interesting one. iOS 27 introduces an Extensions framework, first reported by Gurman in March and detailed by MacRumors, that opens Siri to Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini through a Settings panel and a dedicated Extensions section in the App Store. A system-wide “Search or Ask” gesture, described by 9to5Mac, surfaces a microphone toggle and a switcher between Siri and third-party models. Per Tom’s Guide, Siri itself now lives inside the Dynamic Island, with Natural Language Shortcuts letting users type intended actions in plain English.

A standalone Siri app, surfaced via Bloomberg renders cited by MacRumors, opens to an “Ask Siri” bar with paperclip attachments for images and PDFs, iMessage-style chat bubbles, and dark colors only. It looks, unmistakably, like every other chatbot.

This is the structural story. Apple spent 2024 shipping what Bloomberg called “subpar technology and delayed features” under the Apple Intelligence banner, and has now responded by becoming a distribution layer for everyone else’s models. The Extensions framework reframes the iPhone the way the 1998 Justice Department consent decree reframed Windows: as a platform that must, at the OS level, present rival engines to its own users. Apple is choosing that posture voluntarily, because the alternative, owning a losing model, is worse.

Developer betas for iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, tvOS 27, watchOS 27, and visionOS 27 ship this afternoon, with public betas in July and final releases in the fall. macOS 27, which Gurman describes as receiving a “slight redesign” to fix readability quirks in the Liquid Glass interface introduced with macOS Tahoe, carries a hashmoji filename, “Project Big Bear,” that MacRumors speculates is its eventual name. Tahoe was the last build to run on Intel. The bear, presumably, is the first to run on Google.

Sources