Apple unveiled a rebuilt voice assistant called Siri AI at its developer conference on Monday, running on a custom foundation model co-developed with Google and hosted on Nvidia processors inside Google’s cloud. The arrangement ends two years of delays and quietly resolves a question the company had avoided answering in public: Apple isn’t going to win the frontier model race on its own.

The new top-tier model, branded AFM Cloud Pro, was described by Apple as comparable in quality to Google’s Gemini Frontier tier. Siri AI ships across iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 with back-and-forth conversation, longer answers, on-screen awareness, and a standalone app on iPad and Mac. A new Siri Extensions system in the App Store lets rival assistants, including Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, plug in directly.

Craig Federighi, senior vice president for software engineering, walked through a new system orchestrator that routes requests across Apple’s foundation models. “Today we’re taking a big step forward,” he said, taking aim at competitors he characterized as seemingly pursuing AI for the sake of AI. The implicit target was every keynote of the last 18 months that wasn’t this one.

Tim Cook opened and closed the proceedings without presenting a product. He confirmed he will hand the chief executive role to John Ternus, currently senior vice president of hardware engineering, on Sept. 1, and transition to executive chairman. Apple shares fell close to 2 percent during the keynote.

It’s a strange shape for a legacy moment. Cook’s final keynote functions as both an AI capitulation and a succession announcement, with the company outsourcing the model layer to its largest search-deal counterparty on the way out the door.

Sources