Apple introduced “Siri AI” at its WWDC keynote in Cupertino on Monday, and the most consequential disclosure wasn’t onstage. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the rebuilt assistant runs on a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter variant of Google’s Gemini, licensed for roughly $1 billion per year and served from Nvidia GPUs inside Google’s cloud. The company that spent a decade positioning silicon and software integration as its moat is now renting its flagship intelligence layer from its largest search rival.
Onstage, the framing was tidier. Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, presented the system as Apple Foundation Models on Cloud, or AFM Cloud Pro, which the company described as “similar in quality to Gemini Frontier models.” Siri AI arrives as a standalone app across iPhone, iPad and Mac, retains conversation history, and on laptops can read on-screen images and text. The Passwords app, per TechCrunch, will use Apple Intelligence and Safari to “agentically take action” and rotate insecure credentials without user prompting.
Federighi held the privacy line. “we believe privacy in AI is non-negotiable,” he said, adding that user data is only used to execute requests.
The rest of the slate landed as routine: iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27 (codenamed Golden Gate), tvOS 27, watchOS 27, visionOS 27, plus expanded parental controls. Shares opened up about 2 percent and gave back close to 2 percent during the presentation, a near-perfect intraday referendum on what the Gemini disclosure implies about Apple’s in-house model trajectory.
Tim Cook closed the event with a personal sign-off, telling the room that “some of the greatest highlights of my time as CEO have been events like this.” Hardware engineering chief John Ternus takes over as CEO on September 1. The valedictory keynote was also the one where Apple conceded, in everything but name, that it lost the foundation-model race.