Labs

Apple ships Siri
AI on Gemini,
Cook hands keys
to Ternus

At WWDC 2026, Apple unveiled a rebuilt Siri powered by a co-developed Gemini-family model running on Nvidia GPUs in Google's cloud — and Tim Cook used his final keynote to confirm John Ternus takes over September 1.

By Casey Vanderhoof Frontier labs correspondent · June 10, 2026

Apple confirmed on June 8 that the rebuilt Siri AI shipping with iOS 27 will run on a next-generation Apple Foundation Models stack co-developed with Google, with the top cloud tier, AFM Cloud Pro, executing on Nvidia GPUs inside Google’s data centers. In the same keynote, Tim Cook told the WWDC audience this was his last, naming SVP of Hardware Engineering John Ternus as the next CEO effective September 1.

Two announcements, one structural admission. The company that spent fifteen years insisting the assistant launched in 2011 could be fixed in-house is now renting frontier intelligence from its largest search-payments counterparty, and the founder-era CEO is handing the keys to a mechanical engineer on the way out.

Apple’s own newsroom describes AFM Cloud Pro as “similar in quality to Gemini Frontier models,” which is the polite way of saying it’s one. Private Cloud Compute remains the privacy wrapper, and Craig Federighi spent stage time reinforcing the framing, taking an unsubtle swipe at the competition: “Some appear to be racing forward, seemingly pursuing AI for the sake of AI, without clear regard to the people that it’s ultimately meant to serve.” He added that “we believe privacy in AI is non-negotiable.” The cryptographic story is real. The supply-chain story is that the model weights now originate in Mountain View.

Mike Rockwell, demoing the standalone Siri AI app, called it “now a profoundly more capable assistant” and “more conversational, so you can go back and forth like never before.” The on-screen awareness demo pulled context from Instagram. None of this is wrong. It’s just the inversion of the 2024 Apple Intelligence pitch, in which on-device models were the whole point.

NPR’s Daniel Newman captured the read in markets, characterizing the arrangement as Apple “just paying rent to Google.” Shares opened up roughly 2% and closed negative.

The succession is the quieter story but the louder signal. Ternus ran the hardware org through the Apple silicon transition, the single most successful vertical-integration bet of the Cook era. Putting him in the CEO chair the same week Apple outsources its model layer is a particular kind of message about where the next decade’s integration work actually lives, and where it doesn’t.

The rest of the slate landed on schedule: iPadOS 27, macOS 27 “Golden Gate,” watchOS 27 (dropping support for six older Apple Watch models, including the Series 9, Ultra 2, Ultra 3, and SE 3 in the compatibility shuffle), tvOS 27, and visionOS 27, with public betas in July and consumer release alongside Ternus’s first day.

Cook’s closing line, per Tom’s Guide, was “I truly believe that the best is still ahead.” Read in context, it’s less a benediction than a handoff note to the engineer who has to make the Google bill worth paying.

Sources