At 10:00 a.m. Pacific on June 8, in what TechTimes flagged as his final keynote before handing the company to John Ternus on September 1, Tim Cook walked onstage at WWDC 2026 and announced that Siri would now run on Google.

The framing was softer than that, of course. Apple described a rebuilt Siri powered by its own Apple Foundation Models. MacRumors reported the load-bearing detail: a multi-year deal with Google, costing a reported $1 billion a year, to license Gemini models and cloud technology underneath. TechTimes pegged the licensed model at 1.2 trillion parameters, roughly eight times larger than Apple’s biggest in-house cloud model, with a mixture-of-experts design that activates only a relevant subset per query.

This is the company that spent a decade insisting the stack was the moat.

The user-facing Siri is now a chatbot. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, cited by TechTimes, described an iMessage-style interface with persistent conversation bubbles and full chat history syncing across devices via iCloud. Tom’s Guide added that Siri lives inside the Dynamic Island, carries a paperclip icon for attaching images, PDFs, and documents, and ships with a dark-only UI. Per MacRumors, an extensions framework expands the existing OpenAI handoff so users can route questions to Claude or Gemini instead of Siri’s default brain. Apple is no longer pretending its assistant is the only assistant on the phone.

The timing isn’t subtle. In May, Apple paid $250 million to settle with iPhone buyers who said the AI Siri features promoted at the iPhone 16 launch in September 2024 had remained unavailable for nearly two years. The Gemini deal is what you sign after that settlement, not before it.

Six developer betas seeded the same afternoon: iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27 (Tahoe), tvOS 27, watchOS 27, visionOS 27. Intel Macs were dropped from support; Tahoe is the last release that runs on them.

Cook’s last keynote will be remembered for what Apple stopped insisting on. The transition to Ternus begins with a Siri whose intelligence is rented, whose interface concedes the chatbot won, and whose competitors now ship inside it.

Sources