After a long run of delays, Apple rebuilt Siri in house and still ended up renting the brains from Google. A Bloomberg report published Thursday says the overhauled assistant in iOS 27 will run on a customized Google Gemini model. Apple unveils the software at its WWDC keynote on June 8.
Cupertino blinks
Bloomberg's framing is blunt: Apple's homegrown models weren't good enough, so it paid Google. The customized Gemini reportedly does the heavy lifting while running on Apple's own Private Cloud Compute servers rather than Google's, the detail that lets Apple keep its privacy pitch while leaning on someone else's model.
One outlet floated a specific size for that model, a figure up in the trillions of parameters. Treat it with suspicion. Apple has confirmed no number, and nobody outside Cupertino can measure it anyway.
Whose AI are you talking to?
Here's the part that actually matters. iOS 27 reportedly lets you swap the engine behind Siri. 9to5Mac reports Apple has internally tested routing questions to Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude, on top of its existing ChatGPT deal, through a drop-down menu of outside agents inside the new Search or Ask field.
So Apple stops pretending the assistant has to be entirely its own. Pick your model. That is a genuine shift for a company that spent the better part of fifteen years insisting Siri was Siri.
What else is in the box
Plenty, and most of it reads like a catch-up list. Macworld notes a web search feature aimed squarely at Perplexity, natural-language Shortcuts that build themselves from a sentence, and a stack of AI photo edits. Mark Gurman's report cautions that the final version "could differ" from the leaked renders, the standard hedge before any WWDC. None of it is official until June 8.
Apple takes the stage June 8. The new features reach the public in September, assuming they survive a summer of beta testing.
