Apple’s long-promised Siri overhaul finally shipped at WWDC 2026, rebranded as Siri AI and quietly powered by Apple Foundation Models on Cloud, which Apple acknowledges runs on Nvidia GPUs inside Google’s data centers and reaches quality comparable to Gemini Frontier models. The company that spent a decade selling vertical integration as a moral position is now renting frontier inference from its largest platform rival. The keynote didn’t dwell on this.

It dwelt instead on privacy. “We believe privacy in AI is non-negotiable,” Craig Federighi said, walking through the on-device routing and Private Cloud Compute pathway that handle most queries before anything touches the rented stack. The Passwords app, Apple noted, can now “agentically take action on your behalf.” Siri AI lives as a standalone app, inside the Dynamic Island, and hooked into Spotlight on the Mac, positioned squarely against ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, the last of which is, structurally, also its supplier.

The rest of the slate read as cleanup. iOS 27, macOS 27 Golden Gate, watchOS 27, and visionOS 27. Photos appearing 70% more swiftly. AirDrop transfers 80% faster. Apple Intelligence eligibility restored to the iPhone 11. Siri AI ships in English beta later this year; the EU and China launches are delayed. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman described the roughly hour-and-twenty-minute keynote as “an information-packed presentation in just about an hour and 20 minutes — relatively short by Apple’s standards,” structured to “lead with fixes before features.” That’s polite phrasing for a company catching up on a 2024 promise.

Markets read it accordingly. Apple opened up about 2%, slid through the keynote, and turned negative.

Tim Cook closed by announcing September 1 as his handoff to John Ternus. “Over the years, you have helped people connect, create, learn, and experience the world in extraordinary new ways,” he said. The CEO who built Apple’s services moat exits having outsourced the model layer to Mountain View.

Sources