Apple taps Google's Gemini to power the next Siri

Apple has always taken pride in owning the whole widget, but it just made a massive concession where it hurts most: Siri's brain. And in a wild twist of irony, it is handing the keys to its fiercest smartphone rival.

Apple and Google officially announced a multi-year partnership that will use Google’s Gemini models and cloud infrastructure to power future Apple Foundation Models and the long-delayed overhaul of Siri. In a joint statement, Apple noted that after careful evaluation, Google’s technology provided “the most capable foundation” for its AI efforts.

A billion-dollar brain transplant

While neither company confirmed the price tag, previous reports from Bloomberg revealed that Apple is committing around $1 billion annually to license Google’s AI tech. According to sources familiar with the deal, the agreement is non-exclusive.

Apple did not make this choice on a whim. The company spent significant time testing rival systems from OpenAI and Anthropic before committing to Google. An Apple spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the upgraded Siri will arrive later this year, matching earlier reports that pointed toward a rollout as early as this spring.

Apple was also quick to tell CNBC that its existing partnership with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT is still intact. More importantly, Apple insisted its signature privacy playbook remains unchanged: AI features will continue to execute primarily on-device and route heavier workloads through its Private Cloud Compute architecture.

Wall Street loved the news. The announcement briefly pushed Google’s market cap past $4 trillion for the first time, leaving it behind only Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple itself.

A cozy bond under the antitrust microscope

The team-up lands during a remarkably delicate moment for both tech titans. They are already entangled in massive legal scrutiny over their search relationship. In August 2024, a federal judge ruled that Google illegally protected its search monopoly by paying billions to partners like Apple, who collected an estimated $38 billion across 2021 and 2022 just to keep Google as the default engine in Safari.

By December 2025, Judge Amit Mehta handed down final remedies that strictly barred Google from entering into exclusive, multi-year default placement contracts. Teaming up again on the most pivotal technology of the decade ensures regulators will keep a magnifying glass over every detail of this new contract.

Why it matters

For everyday iPhone users, this is the clearest sign yet that Siri might finally stop embarrassing itself. Apple’s initial rollout of Apple Intelligence delivered subtle, privacy-centric features like photo search and text summaries, but it lacked the sheer wow factor of contemporary chatbots. When Gemini’s reasoning goes live under Siri's hood later this year, users should finally see meaningful leaps in voice capability and contextual task execution.

For the AI landscape, this is a monumental validation for Google. OpenAI may have scored the early splash by serving as Siri's external fallback, but Google just captured the core foundational plumbing. Feeding its models to more than a billion active iPhones gives Google an unmatched distribution footprint, solidifying its comeback against rival frontier labs.

We think Apple’s move is pragmatic, if somewhat humbling. Facing mounting criticism that its internal model progress had stalled, outsourcing Siri's heavy lifting for $1 billion a year is a cost-effective shortcut to close the product gap. Yet, leaning so heavily on your primary operating system competitor creates real long-term vulnerabilities. Apple has plugged its immediate AI hole, but it has tied its flagship interface to a rival it cannot fully control.