Apple unveiled Siri AI at WWDC on Monday, and per TechRadar, the assistant Apple has been promising since 2024 now runs on Google’s Gemini. The company that built its decade-long marketing identity around on-device intelligence and the inferiority of cloud-dependent rivals shipped its flagship AI feature on a competitor’s foundation model.

The reframing is doing a lot of work. Siri AI ships as a standalone app on top of its existing system-wide presence, gains conversational fluency and visual intelligence, and per TechRadar will stop handing off harder queries to third-party providers like ChatGPT. That last part is the tell. The handoff isn’t going away because Apple solved it. It’s going away because Gemini is now the layer underneath.

“We believe privacy in AI is non-negotiable,” Craig Federighi said during the keynote stream, which is the sentence you write when the model isn’t yours.

The rest of Apple Intelligence got the quiet treatment TechCrunch flagged: fixes before features. Safari tab management, one-tap password updating, cross-app context, AI reply suggestions in Messages, Phone pulling context from Mail. The design overhaul, search, and file-sharing repairs all landed without anyone naming the previous versions they were repairing. iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27 Golden Gate, watchOS 27, and visionOS 27 went to developer beta the same day, with public release in fall.

Then the regulatory footnote. Per Apple’s own press release, Siri AI won’t launch in the EU on iOS 27 or iPadOS 27, with the Digital Markets Act cited as the reason. Engadget noted the same-day correction extending the block to watchOS 27, since the watch implementation needs a paired iPhone running Siri AI. macOS and visionOS users in Europe still get it.

This is Tim Cook’s last WWDC. He’s handing the company to John Ternus on September 1. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported investors gave the platform a lukewarm reception, which is the appropriate reaction to a succession keynote whose headline AI product is licensed from Mountain View. The Cook era ends the way it began under Steve Jobs in 2011: Apple depending on Google for a core service it would rather own.

Sources