[UPDATE] Apple Reveals Its Gemini-Powered Siri AI

Apple spent more than a year promising a smarter Siri and slipping its own deadlines. At its WWDC keynote on Monday, the company finally showed the rebuilt assistant in public, and confirmed what the reporting had pointed to for months: the new Siri runs on Google's Gemini. We flagged that arrangement when the first leaks appeared, and the keynote made it official.

Apple is calling the result Siri AI. It lives in a standalone app for the first time, alongside the familiar system-wide assistant, and it keeps a history so you can return to an earlier answer or conversation. Craig Federighi and colleagues demonstrated it pulling an address out of an old email thread, recommending dishes from a restaurant menu, sorting photos into albums, and handling follow-up questions without losing the thread. The version on stage was a long way from the Siri that used to hand you a web search and call it a day.

On the partnership itself, Apple chose its words carefully. Rather than describe Siri as powered by Gemini, it said it had collaborated with Google and the Gemini family of models to build the next generation of Apple Foundation Models. The substance is the same: a large Google model now does the heavy lifting that Apple's own models could not. Earlier reporting put it at roughly 1.2 trillion parameters, running on Apple's private cloud rather than Google's servers.

Privacy, and the regions left waiting

Apple leaned hard on privacy, the one ground where it still wants daylight between itself and Google. "We believe privacy in AI is non-negotiable," Federighi told the audience, adding that user data "is only used to execute your request, and outside experts can continue to verify this promise at any time." Whether independent reviewers get the access they would need to confirm that is the part worth watching.

The rollout is narrower than the demo suggested. Siri AI arrives for US customers later this year, in English first, with more languages to follow. It will not launch in the European Union or China at the same time, owing to regulatory hurdles in both markets. iOS 27 itself reaches further back than any recent release, supporting iPhones from the 11 onward, though the new Siri features sit behind a waitlist in the first beta.

For Apple, the deal is an admission that it could not build a frontier assistant on its own timeline, and a bet that buying one beats shipping late again. For Google, it puts Gemini in front of hundreds of millions of iPhone owners who will never think of it as a Google product. That trade, more than any single demo, is the real story of this WWDC.