Labs

Apple debuts Gemini-powered
Siri AI at
WWDC, leans on
Google for the
cloud brain

At a June 8 keynote that doubled as Tim Cook's farewell WWDC, Apple unveiled Siri AI, a rebuilt conversational assistant whose cloud tier runs on a custom Google model, alongside an iOS 27-and-friends naming sweep across the OS family.

By Casey Vanderhoof Frontier labs correspondent · June 9, 2026

Apple unveiled Siri AI at its June 8 WWDC keynote at Apple Park, a fully conversational rebuild of its assistant whose top cloud tier is powered by a custom Google model that Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman pegs at roughly 1.2 trillion parameters and approximately $1 billion a year in payments to Google. The company that spent a decade selling silicon independence as a brand virtue is now renting somebody else’s frontier model to make its assistant work.

“Today we’re taking a big step forward,” software chief Craig Federighi said on stage, framing what’s functionally an admission. Apple Intelligence, announced two years ago, has spent those two years in visible delay and revision. Siri AI is the version that ships.

The architecture is the story. The new assistant runs on Apple Foundation Models on Cloud, whose premium tier, AFM Cloud Pro, Apple’s own newsroom describes as “comparable in quality to Gemini Frontier models”, because, per Apple’s disclosure, it runs on Nvidia GPUs inside Google’s cloud. OpenAI and Anthropic, the names that have dominated the iPhone integration rumor cycle for two years, are nowhere in the keynote. Google won the bake-off by selling Apple a private Gemini.

Around Siri AI, Apple shipped the expected version bump: iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27 (named Golden Gate, with the Liquid Glass redesign), watchOS 27, tvOS 27, and visionOS 27. Public betas land in mid-July, final releases in September. The Passwords app gains an agent that’ll visit sites via Safari to fix insecure credentials on the user’s behalf, and per The Information by way of TechCrunch, the App Store now hosts AI agent integrations for reservations, document edits, and smart-home control. A new Siri mode inside the Camera app replaces Visual Intelligence; CNBC reports a dedicated Siri AI app on iPhone, iPad, and Mac will store past conversations and results.

Markets read the subtext fast. Apple opened roughly 2% up, turned negative shortly after 2 p.m. ET, and closed near 2% down, according to CNBC and NPR.

It was also Tim Cook’s last WWDC as CEO. John Ternus, the hardware chief, takes over in September, the same month the new OS family ships. Cook leaves after 15 years and a roughly 2,000% split-adjusted stock run, having quietly outsourced the centerpiece of Apple’s AI era to Mountain View on the way out. The handoff to Ternus arrives with the integration debt attached.

Sources