Apple won’t ship its rebuilt Siri AI assistant on iPhones or iPads in the European Union this fall, the company said Monday at WWDC 2026, blaming a deadlock with Brussels over Digital Markets Act interoperability rules. By Tuesday the European Commission had publicly rejected that framing.

Roughly 450 million EU users are affected, on devices where, by Apple’s own figures, more than 90 percent of Siri interactions take place. Siri AI will still reach EU customers on macOS 27 and visionOS 27. EU-based developers, meanwhile, can’t test it on iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch.

Apple’s statement, attributed to software engineering chief Craig Federighi, argued that the DMA as interpreted by regulators would require giving any AI system “nearly unlimited access” to a user’s device. Federighi said Apple had spent months proposing alternatives, including a Trusted System Agent framework that would’ve extended third-party assistants the same device-capability access as Siri AI.

Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier offered a sharply different account. Apple, he told reporters, “was simply unable to develop interoperability solutions that meet essential EU privacy and security standards,” and had instead asked “to be exempted from their interoperability obligations.” That, he said, was “not an option.”

The new Siri AI runs on a three-tier architecture that incorporates a custom Gemini model licensed from Google, a detail Apple confirmed during the WWDC keynote. The product is the centerpiece of this year’s software cycle.

The backdrop is a 500 million euro Commission fine levied against Apple in April 2025 over App Store anti-steering rules. Each side is now reading the same statute and arriving at incompatible conclusions about what compliance looks like for an on-device assistant. Neither offered a timeline. The standoff, for now, is the policy.

Sources