At his 15th and final WWDC keynote as CEO, Tim Cook announced that the rebuilt Siri Apple has been promising for two years will run on a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter Gemini model trained by Google. The framing was carefully managed; the substance is that Apple has outsourced the brain of its flagship consumer AI.

Craig Federighi, Apple’s software chief, said the company had “embarked on a deep collaboration with Google” to build what Apple is branding AFM Cloud Pro, an internal sibling of Google’s Gemini Frontier models. The financial shape, first confirmed in January 2026, is a multi-year licensing arrangement worth roughly $1 billion per year. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported the routing: simple queries stay on-device, mid-tier requests hit Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, and the heavy lifting goes to Google Cloud running on Nvidia Blackwell B200 GPUs. Three tiers, two clouds, one admission that Apple Silicon alone isn’t going to win this race.

Siri itself becomes a standalone app with multi-step commands, persistent conversation history, and attachments. Mike Rockwell, the Apple VP running the project, called it “a profoundly more capable assistant” and “more conversational, so you can go back and forth like never before.” MacRumors noted that users will also be able to swap in Claude or Gemini directly alongside the existing ChatGPT hand-off. Apple is no longer pretending Siri is the smartest model in the room; it’s positioning itself as the router.

The rest of the keynote moved fast. Developer betas shipped the same afternoon for iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS Golden Gate (now Apple Silicon only, Intel support gone), tvOS 27, watchOS 27, and visionOS 27, with public betas in July and stable releases in the fall. iOS 27 is mostly performance work and a Liquid Glass opacity slider. Apple also previewed homeOS and the HomePad, a HomePod speaker fused to a 7-inch display and an A18 chip.

Shares opened up roughly 2%, drifted during the keynote, and turned negative just after 2 p.m. ET. Cook wiped a tear before confirming he steps down September 1. His successor, John Ternus, didn’t appear on stage.

Sources