Apple Just Made Google the Brain Behind Siri (And It Changes Everything)
Apple just did something it almost never does: it handed a core piece of the iPhone experience to a direct competitor.
Not a small feature. Not a back-end service most users will never notice. The intelligence layer powering Siri—the voice assistant that touches every interaction on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Apple has struck a multi-year deal with Google to make Google Gemini the AI brain behind a completely revamped Siri and future “Apple Intelligence” features. This isn’t a partnership in name only. Reuters reports that Apple will pay approximately $1 billion per year for access to a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter Gemini model tuned specifically for Siri and Apple devices.
Let that sink in. Apple—the company that builds its own chips, designs its own operating systems, and famously controls every layer of its stack—is outsourcing the most critical AI component of iOS to Google.
This is the biggest strategic shift in Apple’s platform strategy since it made Google Search the default in Safari. And it signals something fundamental about where AI is heading: frontier models are now so important that even Apple can’t afford to go it alone.
Here’s what just happened, why Apple chose Google Gemini over OpenAI and others, and what this means for the AI race.
What Apple and Google Actually Announced
Apple and Google issued a joint statement confirming that Google Gemini will sit at the heart of Apple’s upcoming AI overhaul. Google’s official blog and CNBC’s coverage provide the key details:
The Deal Structure
Multi-year agreement: Apple and Google have entered a long-term partnership where Apple’s “next-generation Apple Foundation Models” will be based on Google’s Gemini models and cloud technology.
Custom 1.2-trillion-parameter model: Bloomberg reports that Apple will use a customized version of Google Gemini with 1.2 trillion parameters—a massive model optimized for conversational AI, reasoning, and multi-step task completion.
$1 billion annual payment: Apple is paying about $1 billion per year for access to this infrastructure, making it one of the largest AI licensing deals ever announced.
Launch timeline: The Google Gemini-powered Siri and Apple Intelligence features are expected to start rolling out later in 2026, with phased deployment across iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
What This Means for Siri
The partnership goes far beyond a simple API integration. Apple is effectively standardizing much of its cloud AI infrastructure on Google Gemini while wrapping it in Apple’s user experience and privacy framework.
How Google Gemini Will Power the New Siri
The revamped Siri won’t just be a voice assistant that sets timers and plays music. It’s being rebuilt from the ground up as a genuinely intelligent agent—and Google Gemini is the engine making that possible.
Revamped Siri: Longer, More Contextual Conversations
The News reports that the new Siri will handle longer, more contextual conversations and understand multi-step instructions that span apps, documents, and services.
Example use cases:
- “Find all emails from Sarah last month about the project, summarize them, and add key action items to my calendar”
- “Book a restaurant for four people Friday night near my office, something with good vegetarian options, and text the group with details”
- “Review the last three documents I edited, pull out the main themes, and draft an executive summary”
Current Siri can’t do any of this reliably. Google Gemini-powered Siri will handle these tasks natively—processing complex queries and reasoning in the cloud while Apple’s on-device models continue to handle lightweight tasks and sensitive operations locally.
Apple Intelligence Features
Apple Intelligence—the system-wide AI layer introduced in iOS 18—will increasingly rely on Gemini-backed Apple Foundation Models for heavier workloads.
Tribune covers the planned capabilities:
Writing assistance: Email drafts, message replies, document summaries—all powered by Google Gemini models fine-tuned for Apple’s tone and style guidelines.
Smart replies: Context-aware suggestions that understand conversation history, user intent, and relationship dynamics.
Image generation: Visual content creation directly in Messages, Notes, and other apps—using Gemini’s multimodal capabilities.
Developer APIs: Third-party apps will be able to call into Apple Intelligence features, which means they’ll indirectly be powered by Google Gemini infrastructure.
Google Cloud as Apple’s AI Backend
The deal includes Google’s cloud computing infrastructure, meaning a portion of Apple’s AI inference and training will run in Google data centers rather than only in Apple’s own facilities.
Dawn’s analysis emphasizes that this is a significant departure from Apple’s traditional strategy of owning and operating its entire stack. Apple is effectively admitting that scaling frontier AI requires cloud infrastructure at a level that even Apple can’t quickly replicate alone.
Why Apple Picked Google Gemini (After Testing Everyone)
This wasn’t a hasty decision. Adweek reports that Apple spent much of 2025 benchmarking different model providers before locking in Google Gemini.
The Evaluation Process
Apple tested models from:
- OpenAI (ChatGPT GPT-4 and beyond)
- Anthropic (Claude models)
- Smaller specialized AI providers
- Google Gemini (multiple versions)
The evaluation criteria included:
- Raw capability: How well models handle complex reasoning, multi-step tasks, and context retention
- Reliability: Consistency across millions of queries without hallucinations or failures
- Latency: Speed of response for real-time assistant interactions
- Cost: Total cost of ownership at iPhone-user scale (billions of queries monthly)
- Customization willingness: Ability to fine-tune models for Siri-specific use cases
Why Google Gemini Won
According to Bloomberg’s reporting, Apple ultimately “zeroed in on Google” once Gemini’s largest models proved strongest on:
Complex reasoning: Multi-step problem-solving that requires chaining thoughts and maintaining context across turns
Multimodal understanding: Seamlessly processing text, images, voice, and structured data—critical for assistant interactions
Reliability at scale: Google’s infrastructure for serving billions of queries daily with consistent performance
Customization depth: Willingness to build a dedicated 1.2-trillion-parameter model tuned specifically for Apple’s needs
Apple’s statement said Google Gemini offered “the most robust foundation” for Apple’s AI roadmap after extensive testing.
The Strategic Implications: What This Means for Google, Apple, and Rivals
This deal reshapes the competitive landscape in AI and fundamentally changes how we think about platform control.
For Google: A Major Victory
Google Gemini becomes the intelligence layer not just for Android, Chrome, and Google products—but now also for Siri and Apple Intelligence, dramatically expanding its reach to over 2 billion Apple devices.
CNBC notes that analysts called it a “major win for Alphabet,” with Google’s market cap briefly surpassing Apple’s as the news broke. This validates Google Gemini as a tier-one AI platform and cements Google’s position as a critical infrastructure provider in the AI era.
Revenue impact: The $1 billion annual payment is relatively small for Google, but the strategic value is enormous. Every Siri interaction trains and improves Google Gemini, creating a flywheel where Apple users make Google’s models better.
For Apple: Speed Over Independence
Apple gains access to state-of-the-art models quickly, closing the perceived AI gap without waiting years to build equivalently large systems on its own.
But there’s a trade-off: Apple increases dependence on an external provider for a core part of the iOS and macOS experience—something Apple traditionally avoids at all costs.
Tribune’s coverage highlights that Apple is presenting this as a “best of both worlds” approach: tight integration and privacy controls on the front end, with Google Gemini supplying the heavy AI lifting in the background.
The privacy angle: Apple emphasizes that these models will be Apple-controlled variants of Google Gemini, tuned for Apple’s platforms and policies. User data will be processed in ways that align with Apple’s privacy commitments, though skeptics question how much control Apple truly retains when the models run in Google’s cloud.
For OpenAI and Microsoft: A Major Loss
OpenAI and Microsoft lose out on what could have been a flagship partnership. Despite ChatGPT’s brand dominance and Microsoft’s integration into Windows and Office, Apple chose Google Gemini instead.
CNN reports that this underscores a shift toward multi-cloud and multi-model strategies, where device makers pick different AI partners for different layers rather than going all-in with one provider.
Microsoft still dominates enterprise AI through Copilot and Azure. But losing Siri—arguably the most widely used voice assistant in the consumer market—is a strategic blow.
For Meta: Increased Pressure to Scale AI Infrastructure
While Mark Zuckerberg isn’t directly involved in this Apple-Google deal, it increases pressure on Meta significantly.
As Apple and Google align around Google Gemini, Meta’s AI infrastructure push—via Meta Compute and multi-gigawatt superclusters—becomes even more critical to avoid falling behind in the assistant and ecosystem race.
Reuters reports that Mark Zuckerberg is investing hundreds of billions in AI infrastructure specifically to ensure Meta doesn’t depend on external model providers. The Apple-Google deal validates that strategy: companies without their own frontier models risk becoming dependent on competitors.
What This Deal Reveals About the AI Landscape
The Apple-Google Gemini partnership signals several broader trends in how AI is reshaping tech:
Frontier Models Are Now Platform Infrastructure
AI models have become as critical as operating systems, cloud infrastructure, and chip architectures. You can’t build a competitive assistant, recommendation system, or intelligent app without access to frontier-scale AI.
Apple—one of the most vertically integrated companies in history—just admitted it can’t build these models fast enough on its own. That’s a watershed moment.
The “Build vs. Buy” Calculation Has Changed
Five years ago, Apple would have insisted on building Siri’s intelligence entirely in-house. Today, the cost, talent requirements, and time-to-market for frontier AI have made partnerships strategically necessary—even for trillion-dollar companies.
Google spent billions and years building Gemini. Apple calculated it would take too long to catch up and decided to license instead.
Multi-Cloud AI Is the New Normal
Just as companies use AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud simultaneously for different workloads, they’ll increasingly use multiple AI providers for different tasks.
Apple might use Google Gemini for Siri, OpenAI for specific creative features, and Anthropic for content moderation—picking the best model for each use case rather than committing to one vendor.
Privacy Claims Will Be Tested
Apple built its brand on privacy. Google built its business on data. How these companies reconcile that tension—with Google Gemini processing Siri queries from billions of Apple users—will be closely scrutinized.
Apple insists user data stays protected, with processing done in Apple-controlled environments and minimal data sharing with Google. Privacy advocates will be watching to see if that holds true.
Google Gemini Just Became Unavoidable
Here’s what this deal really means: Google Gemini is no longer just Google’s AI model. It’s becoming the AI infrastructure layer for a significant portion of the tech ecosystem.
- Android devices: Powered by Google Gemini
- Chrome and Search: Powered by Google Gemini
- iPhone, iPad, Mac (Siri): Now powered by Google Gemini
- Countless third-party apps: Indirectly using Gemini through Apple Intelligence APIs
Google just became the default AI provider for most of the world’s smartphones and computers—not by forcing adoption, but by building models good enough that even Apple couldn’t justify building alternatives.
For Apple, this is a pragmatic choice that closes the AI gap fast. For Google, it’s validation that Gemini is a platform, not just a product. For the rest of the AI industry, it’s a reminder that infrastructure matters more than features.
The race isn’t just about who builds the best chatbot. It’s about who controls the intelligence layer that every other product depends on.
And right now, Google Gemini is winning.
Author: M. Huzaifa Rizwan
