Very Apple-ish approach to AI catch up: wrap an external tool in a privacy architecture, embed into the OS and productize the orchestration layer.
It will be interesting to see if the Private Cloud Compute + on-device routing can make third-party model capabilities feel like a first-party system without leaking user context to the model provider.
If Apple handles the Google-Apple boundary right, this will be an elegant move on their part, otherwise it will feel like Apple Intelligence with a just a privacy-polished frontend for Gemini.
I'm interested in how it feels to use: whether there is any context leaking, as you mentioned, if it introduces latency, and whether there are any pricing implications? I know they weighed a variety of factors, including the smaller models, but cost had to be a big concern, too... I feel like Google is the only provider giving away so much AI inference for free.
This will further blur the picture about when and how consumers / employees are supposed to pay for AI services. For example, they showed consumer rather than coding tasks, but could you select five files and ask Siri to write a Python script or a small app? Will enterprises just disable Siri AI functionality, or will they be able to route it through their own AI auditing and providers?
As someone who doesn't use Android, they showed a lot of integration into the apps, which I think is where the real magic happens, and it's not something I can do with any 3rd party chatbots today (that I'm aware of). I also don't know that I would trust the other 3rd parties with the access required to pull it off.
It's strange to me that Apple would choose to disadvantage themselves by selecting Google as their provider as opposed to, say, Anthropic or even OpenAI. Doesn't this mean they'll struggle more to differentiate themselves from the assistant on Android phones? Thinking more cynically, couldn't Google, if they wanted, feed Apple an inferior version of Gemini, ensuring they stay ahead?
As the consumer, this just sucks because it means no matter which phone platform you choose, you're getting the same thing underneath, and there's no way to avoid it (besides not using an assistant entirely, which I recognize a lot of people do, myself included).
I'd wager that for 99.9% of "Apple Intelligence" tasks, Google's models perform just as well as other frontier labs. Google also has done more work on getting LLMs running on edge devices compared to anthropic and openAI.
The source also says
> The new architecture centers on Apple Foundation Models co-developed with Google, which Apple says are adapted to run both on-device and on servers through its existing Private Cloud Compute infrastructure
Which could mean Google and Apple have trained some custom models, probably the on-device ones, specifically tailored towards Apple's hardware.
That's not the point of OP. The point of OP is that Google is a direct competitor of Apple for phones / OS, so them giving the "key of the house" to Google is risky
What indicates they’ve given google anything other than a truckload of cash? There’s zero data sharing in the arrangement and the stuff is running on apple devices and in Apples Private Compute.
They already have a very codependent relationship because of their revenue share over putting Google search up front in iPhones so I doubt either party would put that at risk.
I see it differently… Apple has chosen to treat the model as a commodity. By making Gemini an implementation detail, they leave the door open to swap it out for Anthropic or OpenAI without end-users even knowing or caring. So I think they're creating leverage in any future negotiation.
And at the same time they claim it can't be rolled out in Europe because the DMA would force them to allow selection of other AI providers? Which would not even be true if this was an Apple product built on the models of Google, just like the DMA does not force them to pick a different datacenter of office cleaning provider.
Looks like the problem with DMA has more to do with giving full access to other providers outside of the on-device + private cloud compute architecture. The way I interpret the newsroom post [1], Apple doesn't want to give third-party providers full access to user data when the third-party providers cannot run on private cloud compute for privacy reasons, but the EU wants them to offer the choice anyway.
Take it with a grain of salt but I don't think it's other AI providers that Apple is upset about. The DMA would require users to be able install any openclaw like thing onto their device with access to everything that Siri can access today. There are all sorts of arguments to be made here but I can understand why Apple feels this way and wants to offer a good experience here.
> they claim it can't be rolled out in Europe because the DMA would force them to allow selection of other AI providers
They don't claim that. All they said is "later in the EU as we look into privacy and security" after spending two hours saying how private and secure everything is.
DMA would force them to allow usage from other apps than their own and other assitants than Siri, especially for on-device models.
> I see it differently… Apple has chosen to treat the model as a commodity
It didn't work out well for Yahoo.com. It turned out that Google Search was the value and yahoo.com just skin around it. It might be the same for Apple. Gemini is the valuable part, what particular device you use it on matters less.
Didn't they famously have a search deal with Google (that they were also ultimately fined for - in the EU at least)? So there's definitely precedent with Google as a "partner".
Bingo. They see this as the future commodity it will be. Customers will choose AI providers much way they choose a car: taste, price, a few other factors.
And to your point, Google has a massive balance sheet, produces their own AI chips, and is not going anywhere anytime soon.
> It's strange to me that Apple would choose to disadvantage themselves by selecting Google as their provider as opposed to, say, Anthropic or even OpenAI. Doesn't this mean they'll struggle more to differentiate themselves from the assistant on Android phones? Thinking more cynically, couldn't Google, if they wanted, feed Apple an inferior version of Gemini, ensuring they stay ahead?
Is it really all that difference from Apple defaulting to Google's search engine?
Depends on which way the money is flowing. Google pays Apple for default search engine. Is Google paying Apple for using Gemini? That feels like a much heavier investment if they are
At the time Apple made this decision there wasn’t as strong of a difference in model quality between Google, anthropic, and OpenAI as there is now. Also Apple definitely burnt some bridges with OpenAI on the agreement they made together a year earlier.
Especially if you are not asking siri to code stuff. If your use case is still "personal context" with "conversation", even if there is a 9/10 difference, the users may see their abilities going from 3/10 presently to 6/10 or 7/10, and still a massive upgrade for most of them. I think therapy and scientific research may remain in the domain of frontier chat interfaces for another year.
OpenAI and Anthropic don't make small models. Google happens to already have a billion devices that would benefit from small models, so they made one.
Google basically gets 1 billion per year for free*.
Anthropic or OpenAI have no foothold into the mobile market. Google has integrated a shitton of AI functionality into their latest Pixel phones. That’s what would scare me if I was Apple and worried that if AI prevails this could steal some market share from me. The other two are irrelevant in this context.
Yet? Maybe they are but embedding adds or paid signal amplification/probability tweaking has already been floated on the market and may already be a product.
It doesn't matter if it's classic search or LLM. They can monetize tracking information as easily as they can sell ads. They'll have fast cheap custom-built assistant models that run on device by default, keeping things profitable. In time they'll likely double-dip again by injecting product placement in results.
Search has ads but Siri doesn't. And when Apple puts ads in Siri they won't be Google ads. I don't think Google benefits from this deal enough to be worth paying.
Maybe. Search ads likely make Google more money than they pay apple. For AI, Google currently loses money. If they eventually make money via ads, then sure. Else, apple will have to pay them
This is the most likely explanation. Apple manufacturers some of the best inference silicon on earth. Apache licensed models are already 1000x smarter than siri and strongly outperform anthropic, openai and google in the 8-128GiB of RAM range. The article says Apple can run this stuff on customers’ hardware, so that’s the range of model sizes that actually matter.
> Apache licensed models are already 1000x smarter than siri and strongly outperform anthropic, openai and google in the 8-128GiB of RAM range
smart is a weird term, gemma4 is an amazing omni model better than qwen3.6 for non coding tasks (as for all Gemini models). For Apple Intelligence gemma4 makes a lot more sense.
I'm speculating, but it's likely that Google is the only provider who is willing to adhere to the inference compute requirements that Apple sets out for their foundation models. They are, after all, the only provider that will let you host their FMs in your data center.
It may be a clever move. By using the same models as android (contractually?), they can compete on the user experience which they typically handle better than android phone providers.
What part of using Gemini do you think is a disadvantage?
Also important to remember how immature OpenAI and Anthropic are as companies. It would be a huge technical, legal, and reputational risk to commit to using them.
> Apple Intelligence is designed to protect your privacy at every step. It’s integrated into the core of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac through on-device processing.
The agent harness matters just as much as the AI model. Using Hermes or OpenClaw feels like night vs day when using OpenAI’s apps even when using the same exact model.
You can even see difference in agent harnesses using the same model in the same company if you compare Gemini CLI with AntiGrav. They are different experiences.
I’m pretty sure Apple’s agent harness will be drastically different from Google’s even with the same model
The differentiation is the integration, not the model itself which is mostly fungible. And afaik Apple is running these models on their own compute, so I don't think google can pull a bait and switch.
It’s the DMA regulation that forces Apple to give the same access as they have to other AI chat apps.
Once it leaves the device Apple does not know what those other ai chat apps will do with the gathered data.
> Siri AI is private by design and deeply integrated across Apple’s platforms using on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, which extends the privacy and security of iPhone into the cloud. However, under EU regulators’ extreme interpretation of the DMA, Apple would have to give any virtual assistant direct access to users’ private data — and the ability to directly control other installed applications — as soon as Siri AI is made available in the EU, without the essential protections necessary to keep users and their data safe.
> It’s the DMA regulation that forces Apple to give the same access as they have to other AI chat apps.
But why can Tesla ship Grok to their cars in the EU without any problems? Why aren't they required to let me choose between Grok, OpenAI etc or even a custom endpoint?
> But why can Tesla ship Grok to their cars in the EU without any problems?
Simply because they are too small in user count. EU DMA, DSA etc. only apply at certain thresholds. Twitter for example falls under the scope, but Tesla is a distinct entity from Twitter and even if they were merged together, they would still be distinct services in the eye of the law.
As a screen reader user, Apple does have a first party screen reader, VoiceOver, and does indeed not let you run a third party one. In fact, it does not work well even on the more open MacOS. So essentially it's VoiceOver or nothing. Luckily, especially on iOS, VoiceOver mostly works well.
I don't think they're "trusting Google" with anything. It's a Google model run by Apple, just like you download a model from Hugging Face to run when you want to.
Since it's the user's device, not Apple's, EU correctly "interprets" this as the user has the right to do whatever they please, including installing third-party chat apps.
Apple are just bulshitters when it comes to actual users, and not their corporate definition of a user.
This is such a shallow take. There are obvious privacy and security tradeoffs here. The EU competition framework is good in many ways, but this is actually something I don’t think we have the regulatory frameworks in place to handle yet , or social norms and understanding about why giving any Tom dick and Harry root on all your data is a bad idea.
It’s paternalistic, but I agree with Apple that free for all access to this kind of data is not a great idea. Ironically, before this could work we’d actually need much more EU style data regulation, and more consistently enforced.
Unless Apple proves otherwise I'm more inclined to believe they're either 1. Using this to try and shape the DMA in their own interest (definitely not their users' interest) or 2. Doing something with the data that would not be allowed in the EU (also not in their users' interest at all) or both.
From the link "Nvidia has its own “confidential computing” feature that encrypts data as it’s being processed, which will be used with other privacy and security measures to protect user data"
They say it's because the EU's DMA would require them to open up device data to third-party assistants, and they'd no longer be able to guarantee user privacy.
I don't see what the issue is. The user could then select Apple (or Mistral) for strong privacy or another provider for customers that don't care.
I primarily want Apple to provide extension points so that I can select my own provider, just as I can choose where to host my mail or install another app as my instant messenger.
Sure, I could install another provider's app, but it wouldn't have the same integrations, similar to how an instant messaging app would be less useful if notifications were limited to iMessage.
Nothing in the law requires the pop up. It definitely doesn’t require the obnoxious bullshit that most companies put up (aka the dark pattern to get you to agree to every unreasonable part of their terms just to read the page).
The alternative would be to just stop invasive tracking and add the cookie when it’s actually needed.
The smell is that Apple doesn't want to give the same level of access to third-party AI assistants that Siri will get.
For what it's worth, Apple claimed they proposed an "equivalent access" framework with some kind of "trusted agent framework" approach, but that it was shot down by the EU. I suspect it was way more inconvenient for third-party developers than Apple lets on.
This has been the case for quite a while. Like Reminders - You can't replace the phrase "Siri, remind me to ___" with a third party app. I'm surprised the EU lets them ship Reminders there.
> The company reiterated that Apple Intelligence relies on on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, with a promise that user data is only used to execute the immediate request and is not accessible to Apple or third parties. Apple added that outside experts can verify those privacy guarantees "at any time."
Yes, the "Apple needs to look at your data to do this, but we don't have any way to look at the data if we wanted to". That's impossible, unless they open souce iOS and let people take control over their devices, and let people self host inference, so people can check that there is no network traffic. If it is as they say, they could let people host it without any downsides.
I would love to learn more about what's actually powering Apple Intelligence now. Are they using flagship Gemini models behind their own prompts? Fine-tuning? Pre-training their own models based on Gemini?
Is there a meaningful distinction between the Gemini-powered models and Apple Foundation Models? Does that distinction vary for on-device vs hosted models? Are some models running on Apple's Private Cloud Compute and others running on Google iron?
Local is probably similar to Gemma e4b you can get right now on Google Edge Gallery (the ios and Android app). Guessing that the more powerful version that will only work on the 12gb ram devices will be something unreleased that is similar but a bit larger
Google also awhile back announced being able to run full Gemini by leasing / renting hardware in your own datacenters so companies can train or access data without needing to send things to their datacenters. Nvidia based. Guessing Private Compute might just be Apple leasing a ton of those?
The public version of Gemini is ridiculous. At least half their search "answers" are just wrong. If you then start a follow up chat the answers change but usually still half wrong.
Search would be better without the added AI hallucinations above it. If I want an AI answer I'll go and ask Claude, the quality difference is huge.
> The public version of Gemini is ridiculous. At least half their search "answers" are just wrong.
That's not Gemini, that's AI Mode (in Search), they're different products built by fairly different part of Google (actually one if built by Deepmind).
(I don't think it's much comparable to https://gemini.google.com/app at least in the past you'd get very different results)
It has to be really because think of how fast it has to come up with an answer (ie time for a regular google query) and the immense scale of billions of people querying it many times a day, all for free.
Google apps are the most downloaded apps in the Apple App Store already. This reminds me of the original Apple Maps, which was just a front end for Google Maps.
>The company reiterated that Apple Intelligence relies on on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, with a promise that user data is only used to execute the immediate request and is not accessible to Apple or third parties. Apple added that outside experts can verify those privacy guarantees "at any time."
> Apple added that outside experts can verify those privacy guarantees "at any time."
To my understanding, these "outside experts" have to go through a vetting process by Apple first. There are no publicly available audits of the infrastructure planned right now.
This move kind of reminds me of the original iPhone with google maps. You're competing with google, but you're using their infrastructure. Why wouldn't they just go with another provider like OpenAI or Anthropic?
To be fair, with the original iPhone they weren't competing. Google did backend web stuff well, so Apple partnered with them and made nice local apps that were fed by Google's cloud data. The same was true for the YouTube app.
After Google saw the iPhone (before the public), they pivoted their vision for Android (it was originally on blackberry-style hardware), and that's when the "thermonuclear war" started. Kind of interesting Steve Jobs would have showed the iPhone off like that, when something very similar happened with Bill Gates, which prompted the development of Windows (according to Jobs).
19 years later, it's probably time to be pragmatic again. If Apple isn't able to deliver on some of these AI integrations into the OS, they risk losing users to Android. If they have to pay someone for a model, they might as well choose the one they think is going to be best for their users. This keeps existing iPhone users on iPhone, and may pull over some Android users looking for the same features, but with better privacy. That seems like a win for Apple. To pay OpenAI instead of Google would just be spite at this point. Maybe well deserved, but the leadership has all changed over in the last two decades, so they'd be fighting old wars. Though I think they should still think twice before showing Google anything that hasn't yet been released.
Given that they had originally selected OpenAI for Siri, and that deal fell through, I would guess something about their relationship with OpenAI fell through. Maybe OpenAI wouldn't let Apple run their model on Apple's servers.
Google is almost closer to a conglomerate than a coherent horizontally integrated corporation. The individual parts of Google are like Fortune500 companies themselves, and tend to act in their own interest.
OpenAI or Anthropic are not anywhere as well funded as Google. Apple already has everyone in their pocket via the ecosystem, they just have to not crap the bed. They value stability over the competitive component here.
Google sold Apple the ability to run certain Gemini models on Apple's data-center hardware, using Google's orchestration layer. Apple hooks into that not dissimilar from an API-provider, and then builds everything upstream.
Meaning the system prompt(s), harness, entry and exit points, and skills. So the product is still "Siri AI", because of all the stuff that takes it from a raw infrastructure concern upon up into a "product" is Apple's responsibility.
Google are "okay with that" because Apple pays them $1B a year, per press reports, to be.
Any business can do this now actually - you just need to lease/rent hardware through a Google partner and you can run an Nvidia based server in your own datacenter running (supposedly) the latest full Gemini models.
I don't think you conceptualize Google's game plan. all these companies care about is b2b contracts so they can inflate their balance sheets because when it's digital, it doesn't have to actually exist for it to "make money"
what i think why they are too much relying on Google is coz they are way much towards making models open source and launching more much better models to public as if in future apple part way from google they might still have much better models to rely on and if we see the history google has been partnered with Apple since the launch of first Iphone
I honestly don’t understand how anyone can believe that Apple is limiting user options for privacy reasons, rather than trying to maintain an unfair advantage over other vendors.
I’m not saying people who hold this view are being dishonest at all. But sometimes, to me, brands like Harley-Davidson or Apple seem closer to a cult than to a typical corporation.
When you have to image a highly irrational reason to explain why groups of people do the things they do, there's a decent chance you just don't understand their perspective. They may be acting reasonably rationally from their own perspective. (As you said yourself: "I honestly don't understand...")
Because privacy is actually a big feature, many people are skeptical about AI and the big model providers and don't trust them. They're less skeptical about on-device AI and so Apple is pushing that and making privacy a core feature of their online offering as well.
I probably wouldn't use it without that. It's one thing sending my shitty code to be trained on, and another thing entirely to give these companies access to my personal life and information.
Apple could have done something like bedrock and used a SOTA model but instead they are fiddling with local models or whatever.
Also I have seen that Apple has some strange lust towards image generation as if that's what people really want. I have this slop image generation thing on my phone and it is useless.
Here's what I want: natural language interaction to achieve complex workflows in iPhone. Example: find the cheapest way to go from A to B and book it using the Deutsche Bahn Train app.
I don't disagree that local Gemini is better but if you've tried it in iPhone, it is slow, hallucinates and overheats the phone. For anything slightly non-trivial like the workflow example I gave, I think it will be close to useless.
Why is Apple providing people with a photorealistic deepfake generator so they can participate in dressing down women, digital blackface, and god knows what else? This is crossing a line, and simply saying "well other big tech companies crossed it first!" is not an excuse.
Very Apple-ish approach to AI catch up: wrap an external tool in a privacy architecture, embed into the OS and productize the orchestration layer.
It will be interesting to see if the Private Cloud Compute + on-device routing can make third-party model capabilities feel like a first-party system without leaking user context to the model provider.
If Apple handles the Google-Apple boundary right, this will be an elegant move on their part, otherwise it will feel like Apple Intelligence with a just a privacy-polished frontend for Gemini.
I'm interested in how it feels to use: whether there is any context leaking, as you mentioned, if it introduces latency, and whether there are any pricing implications? I know they weighed a variety of factors, including the smaller models, but cost had to be a big concern, too... I feel like Google is the only provider giving away so much AI inference for free.
This will further blur the picture about when and how consumers / employees are supposed to pay for AI services. For example, they showed consumer rather than coding tasks, but could you select five files and ask Siri to write a Python script or a small app? Will enterprises just disable Siri AI functionality, or will they be able to route it through their own AI auditing and providers?
Oh yes Apple "wraps" their AI in a "privacy architecture" -- you can't use Carplay unless you turn it (Siri) on.
As someone who doesn't use Android, they showed a lot of integration into the apps, which I think is where the real magic happens, and it's not something I can do with any 3rd party chatbots today (that I'm aware of). I also don't know that I would trust the other 3rd parties with the access required to pull it off.
[delayed]
It's strange to me that Apple would choose to disadvantage themselves by selecting Google as their provider as opposed to, say, Anthropic or even OpenAI. Doesn't this mean they'll struggle more to differentiate themselves from the assistant on Android phones? Thinking more cynically, couldn't Google, if they wanted, feed Apple an inferior version of Gemini, ensuring they stay ahead?
As the consumer, this just sucks because it means no matter which phone platform you choose, you're getting the same thing underneath, and there's no way to avoid it (besides not using an assistant entirely, which I recognize a lot of people do, myself included).
I'd wager that for 99.9% of "Apple Intelligence" tasks, Google's models perform just as well as other frontier labs. Google also has done more work on getting LLMs running on edge devices compared to anthropic and openAI.
The source also says > The new architecture centers on Apple Foundation Models co-developed with Google, which Apple says are adapted to run both on-device and on servers through its existing Private Cloud Compute infrastructure
Which could mean Google and Apple have trained some custom models, probably the on-device ones, specifically tailored towards Apple's hardware.
That's not the point of OP. The point of OP is that Google is a direct competitor of Apple for phones / OS, so them giving the "key of the house" to Google is risky
What indicates they’ve given google anything other than a truckload of cash? There’s zero data sharing in the arrangement and the stuff is running on apple devices and in Apples Private Compute.
They already have a very codependent relationship because of their revenue share over putting Google search up front in iPhones so I doubt either party would put that at risk.
I see it differently… Apple has chosen to treat the model as a commodity. By making Gemini an implementation detail, they leave the door open to swap it out for Anthropic or OpenAI without end-users even knowing or caring. So I think they're creating leverage in any future negotiation.
And at the same time they claim it can't be rolled out in Europe because the DMA would force them to allow selection of other AI providers? Which would not even be true if this was an Apple product built on the models of Google, just like the DMA does not force them to pick a different datacenter of office cleaning provider.
Looks like the problem with DMA has more to do with giving full access to other providers outside of the on-device + private cloud compute architecture. The way I interpret the newsroom post [1], Apple doesn't want to give third-party providers full access to user data when the third-party providers cannot run on private cloud compute for privacy reasons, but the EU wants them to offer the choice anyway.
[1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...
There's a post here: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...
Take it with a grain of salt but I don't think it's other AI providers that Apple is upset about. The DMA would require users to be able install any openclaw like thing onto their device with access to everything that Siri can access today. There are all sorts of arguments to be made here but I can understand why Apple feels this way and wants to offer a good experience here.
> they claim it can't be rolled out in Europe because the DMA would force them to allow selection of other AI providers
They don't claim that. All they said is "later in the EU as we look into privacy and security" after spending two hours saying how private and secure everything is.
DMA would force them to allow usage from other apps than their own and other assitants than Siri, especially for on-device models.
Edit I stand somewhat corrected but it's regular Apple bullshit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48451012
> I see it differently… Apple has chosen to treat the model as a commodity
It didn't work out well for Yahoo.com. It turned out that Google Search was the value and yahoo.com just skin around it. It might be the same for Apple. Gemini is the valuable part, what particular device you use it on matters less.
We’re clearly in a different situation at the moment. Google is far from the only useful back end language model provider.
That’s exactly what a model should be: Implementation detail.
It’s a bit like when Steve Jobs turned down acquiring Dropbox telling them they’re just a feature, not a product
Didn't they famously have a search deal with Google (that they were also ultimately fined for - in the EU at least)? So there's definitely precedent with Google as a "partner".
Maybe they're looking for stability and trust Google to be around longer than Antrophic or OpenAI when the storm starts.
Bingo. They see this as the future commodity it will be. Customers will choose AI providers much way they choose a car: taste, price, a few other factors.
And to your point, Google has a massive balance sheet, produces their own AI chips, and is not going anywhere anytime soon.
People are not even going to choose their AI providers in the future, it's going to be a part of some other product.
And Apple already has a $20B search partnership with Google they can build on.
fair and square, indeed
I’ll just put this link here: https://killedbygoogle.com/
I am familiar what Google has killed before, but a contract with Apple is not something they'll throw out of the window for no reasons.
I may be jaded, but I do not trust Google for product offering stability. Obviously, Apple is a way bigger fish.
It's not a popular opinion on HN but Google is actually super stable from a B2B perspective. Even app engine (2008) is still kicking.
Google was likely the only lab grown up enough that could handle Apple's volume and requests.
Apple was not going to hand over the keys to AI to just anyone.
Apple is a Fortune 5 company with a brand value alone worth more than any of these AI labs besides Google.
There's too much at stake for them to not play it safe. There's almost nothing to gain taking a risk
> It's strange to me that Apple would choose to disadvantage themselves by selecting Google as their provider as opposed to, say, Anthropic or even OpenAI. Doesn't this mean they'll struggle more to differentiate themselves from the assistant on Android phones? Thinking more cynically, couldn't Google, if they wanted, feed Apple an inferior version of Gemini, ensuring they stay ahead?
Is it really all that difference from Apple defaulting to Google's search engine?
Depends on which way the money is flowing. Google pays Apple for default search engine. Is Google paying Apple for using Gemini? That feels like a much heavier investment if they are
At the time Apple made this decision there wasn’t as strong of a difference in model quality between Google, anthropic, and OpenAI as there is now. Also Apple definitely burnt some bridges with OpenAI on the agreement they made together a year earlier.
> wasn’t as strong of a difference in model quality between Google, anthropic, and OpenAI as there is now
What's the difference now? I would guess 9/10 people here would have a very hard time telling the models apart in a blind taste test.
Especially if you are not asking siri to code stuff. If your use case is still "personal context" with "conversation", even if there is a 9/10 difference, the users may see their abilities going from 3/10 presently to 6/10 or 7/10, and still a massive upgrade for most of them. I think therapy and scientific research may remain in the domain of frontier chat interfaces for another year.
OpenAI and Anthropic don't make small models. Google happens to already have a billion devices that would benefit from small models, so they made one. Google basically gets 1 billion per year for free*.
Anthropic or OpenAI have no foothold into the mobile market. Google has integrated a shitton of AI functionality into their latest Pixel phones. That’s what would scare me if I was Apple and worried that if AI prevails this could steal some market share from me. The other two are irrelevant in this context.
Google will probably eventually pay Apple to be the assistant, a la search.
Google pays to be the default search because they make more from selling ads on those searches than they are paying for the search.
I don't see the same thing here. Google isn't making any money from being the assistant in Apple, so why would they pay to be it?
Yet? Maybe they are but embedding adds or paid signal amplification/probability tweaking has already been floated on the market and may already be a product.
For Google, search quality is a moat. And it's becoming apparent that AI quality is a moat as well.
It doesn't matter if it's classic search or LLM. They can monetize tracking information as easily as they can sell ads. They'll have fast cheap custom-built assistant models that run on device by default, keeping things profitable. In time they'll likely double-dip again by injecting product placement in results.
Google can't track information in private inference. That's kinda the point.
Search has ads but Siri doesn't. And when Apple puts ads in Siri they won't be Google ads. I don't think Google benefits from this deal enough to be worth paying.
Maybe. Search ads likely make Google more money than they pay apple. For AI, Google currently loses money. If they eventually make money via ads, then sure. Else, apple will have to pay them
Apple has started adding ads to iOS (e.g. maps), just like Microsoft.
I guarantee you Google will start letting people pay to influence the output of the Gemini models once they figure out how to do it.
Eventually? I bet they already are.
This is the most likely explanation. Apple manufacturers some of the best inference silicon on earth. Apache licensed models are already 1000x smarter than siri and strongly outperform anthropic, openai and google in the 8-128GiB of RAM range. The article says Apple can run this stuff on customers’ hardware, so that’s the range of model sizes that actually matter.
> Apache licensed models are already 1000x smarter than siri and strongly outperform anthropic, openai and google in the 8-128GiB of RAM range
smart is a weird term, gemma4 is an amazing omni model better than qwen3.6 for non coding tasks (as for all Gemini models). For Apple Intelligence gemma4 makes a lot more sense.
Not if the privacy situation is what Apple says in the Keynote. Only if they can tap that data.
I'm speculating, but it's likely that Google is the only provider who is willing to adhere to the inference compute requirements that Apple sets out for their foundation models. They are, after all, the only provider that will let you host their FMs in your data center.
It may be a clever move. By using the same models as android (contractually?), they can compete on the user experience which they typically handle better than android phone providers.
What part of using Gemini do you think is a disadvantage?
Also important to remember how immature OpenAI and Anthropic are as companies. It would be a huge technical, legal, and reputational risk to commit to using them.
Anthropic and OpenAI are stuck on slower and more expensive nvidia hardware. It doesn’t scale like googles TPUs.
Maybe openai wasn’t up to the level of customization and privacy they needed
Also openai and Jonny Ive (love from) are cooking some device — may be personal
Google has very good small models which can run locally on a phone - Gemma4.
OpenAI/Anthropic have nothing in this segment.
Did Apple indicate they are using local models?
That was their original design with Apple Intelligence: do as much locally as possible, only invoke the cloud in a very controlled way when necessary.
> Apple Intelligence is designed to protect your privacy at every step. It’s integrated into the core of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac through on-device processing.
https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/
TPUs
The agent harness matters just as much as the AI model. Using Hermes or OpenClaw feels like night vs day when using OpenAI’s apps even when using the same exact model.
You can even see difference in agent harnesses using the same model in the same company if you compare Gemini CLI with AntiGrav. They are different experiences.
I’m pretty sure Apple’s agent harness will be drastically different from Google’s even with the same model
The differentiation is the integration, not the model itself which is mostly fungible. And afaik Apple is running these models on their own compute, so I don't think google can pull a bait and switch.
Not launching in EU feels like a smell. It does look interesting enough for me to try it out before disabling Apple Intelligence again.
It’s the DMA regulation that forces Apple to give the same access as they have to other AI chat apps.
Once it leaves the device Apple does not know what those other ai chat apps will do with the gathered data.
> Siri AI is private by design and deeply integrated across Apple’s platforms using on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, which extends the privacy and security of iPhone into the cloud. However, under EU regulators’ extreme interpretation of the DMA, Apple would have to give any virtual assistant direct access to users’ private data — and the ability to directly control other installed applications — as soon as Siri AI is made available in the EU, without the essential protections necessary to keep users and their data safe.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...
> It’s the DMA regulation that forces Apple to give the same access as they have to other AI chat apps.
But why can Tesla ship Grok to their cars in the EU without any problems? Why aren't they required to let me choose between Grok, OpenAI etc or even a custom endpoint?
The are not a "gatekeeper" under DMA (not enough users). Same as macOS.
Because Tesla hasn't been classified as a gate-keeper in the DMA.
> But why can Tesla ship Grok to their cars in the EU without any problems?
Simply because they are too small in user count. EU DMA, DSA etc. only apply at certain thresholds. Twitter for example falls under the scope, but Tesla is a distinct entity from Twitter and even if they were merged together, they would still be distinct services in the eye of the law.
so to translate:
- Apple has powerful capabilities in iOS to enable Siri AI.
- EU's DMA requires them to allow users to install third-party AI backends.
- Apple doesn't think parties other than themselves should be trusted with those iOS permissions.
I guess it'd be like if Apple allowed a first-party screen reader for iOS, so they refused to allow third-party screen readers.
As a screen reader user, Apple does have a first party screen reader, VoiceOver, and does indeed not let you run a third party one. In fact, it does not work well even on the more open MacOS. So essentially it's VoiceOver or nothing. Luckily, especially on iOS, VoiceOver mostly works well.
I don't think they trust Gemini as they run that on-device or on-site, on Apple's own servers.
See also https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
I don't think they're "trusting Google" with anything. It's a Google model run by Apple, just like you download a model from Hugging Face to run when you want to.
updated my post to reflect this, thanks.
> Once it leaves the device Apple does not know what those other ai chat apps will do with the gathered data.
Yeah, that's the whole fucking point.
> Once it leaves the device Apple does not know what those other ai chat apps will do with the gathered data.
It's the user's data. Not Apple's. And it should be the user's right to send it to whoever for whatever results, imo
Meta would probably start a massive ad campain to pay people money to install Meta iPhone AI.
Translation:
Since it's the user's device, not Apple's, EU correctly "interprets" this as the user has the right to do whatever they please, including installing third-party chat apps.
Apple are just bulshitters when it comes to actual users, and not their corporate definition of a user.
BTW, did you know that in Japan, and in Japan only, you can change the Siri shortcut button to start other voice assistants? https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/11/18/ios-26-2-third-party-voic...
Or that they wouldn't let you set default maps app outside of the EU: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/03/14/dma-compliance-default-ma...
This is such a shallow take. There are obvious privacy and security tradeoffs here. The EU competition framework is good in many ways, but this is actually something I don’t think we have the regulatory frameworks in place to handle yet , or social norms and understanding about why giving any Tom dick and Harry root on all your data is a bad idea.
It’s paternalistic, but I agree with Apple that free for all access to this kind of data is not a great idea. Ironically, before this could work we’d actually need much more EU style data regulation, and more consistently enforced.
Sounds like Apple PR bullshit.
Unless Apple proves otherwise I'm more inclined to believe they're either 1. Using this to try and shape the DMA in their own interest (definitely not their users' interest) or 2. Doing something with the data that would not be allowed in the EU (also not in their users' interest at all) or both.
Because outsourcing to Google is so much trustworthy...
I believe Google provides the weights, compute is apple owned
> Apple to use Google servers with Nvidia hardware for the new Siri
https://www.macworld.com/article/3156959/apple-to-use-google...
People have to stop thinking Apple is somehow different.
From the link "Nvidia has its own “confidential computing” feature that encrypts data as it’s being processed, which will be used with other privacy and security measures to protect user data"
From your link:
> Apple’s going to try to run as much of the new Siri as possible on-device
Anthropic and OpenAI don't have edge models.
They say it's because the EU's DMA would require them to open up device data to third-party assistants, and they'd no longer be able to guarantee user privacy.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...
I don't see what the issue is. The user could then select Apple (or Mistral) for strong privacy or another provider for customers that don't care.
I primarily want Apple to provide extension points so that I can select my own provider, just as I can choose where to host my mail or install another app as my instant messenger.
Sure, I could install another provider's app, but it wouldn't have the same integrations, similar to how an instant messaging app would be less useful if notifications were limited to iMessage.
It is a smell. But it's the EU that smells bad, when it comes to tech regulation. It's the smell of cookie popup warnings.
Nothing in the law requires the pop up. It definitely doesn’t require the obnoxious bullshit that most companies put up (aka the dark pattern to get you to agree to every unreasonable part of their terms just to read the page).
The alternative would be to just stop invasive tracking and add the cookie when it’s actually needed.
The smell is that Apple doesn't want to give the same level of access to third-party AI assistants that Siri will get.
For what it's worth, Apple claimed they proposed an "equivalent access" framework with some kind of "trusted agent framework" approach, but that it was shot down by the EU. I suspect it was way more inconvenient for third-party developers than Apple lets on.
This has been the case for quite a while. Like Reminders - You can't replace the phrase "Siri, remind me to ___" with a third party app. I'm surprised the EU lets them ship Reminders there.
> The company reiterated that Apple Intelligence relies on on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, with a promise that user data is only used to execute the immediate request and is not accessible to Apple or third parties. Apple added that outside experts can verify those privacy guarantees "at any time."
Yes, the "Apple needs to look at your data to do this, but we don't have any way to look at the data if we wanted to". That's impossible, unless they open souce iOS and let people take control over their devices, and let people self host inference, so people can check that there is no network traffic. If it is as they say, they could let people host it without any downsides.
I would love to learn more about what's actually powering Apple Intelligence now. Are they using flagship Gemini models behind their own prompts? Fine-tuning? Pre-training their own models based on Gemini?
Is there a meaningful distinction between the Gemini-powered models and Apple Foundation Models? Does that distinction vary for on-device vs hosted models? Are some models running on Apple's Private Cloud Compute and others running on Google iron?
> what's actually powering Apple Intelligence now.
It's a 3B Apple Foundation model.
https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/introducing-apple...
If you've got a mac, you can use this to play around with it:
https://apfel.franzai.com/
I think what they mean by “now” is the stuff announced today.
Local is probably similar to Gemma e4b you can get right now on Google Edge Gallery (the ios and Android app). Guessing that the more powerful version that will only work on the 12gb ram devices will be something unreleased that is similar but a bit larger
Google also awhile back announced being able to run full Gemini by leasing / renting hardware in your own datacenters so companies can train or access data without needing to send things to their datacenters. Nvidia based. Guessing Private Compute might just be Apple leasing a ton of those?
Apple Private Cloud Compute is running on M2/M3 Ultra. I'm not sure if Gemini Flash can fit in that amount of RAM.
Gemini (at least public free version) hallucinates way too much. If it's like that, it can go very badly for Apple.
I used Gemini exclusively via the API but downloaded the app last week for something. Even on max settings, it is ridiculously nerfed!
The public version of Gemini is ridiculous. At least half their search "answers" are just wrong. If you then start a follow up chat the answers change but usually still half wrong.
Search would be better without the added AI hallucinations above it. If I want an AI answer I'll go and ask Claude, the quality difference is huge.
> The public version of Gemini is ridiculous. At least half their search "answers" are just wrong.
That's not Gemini, that's AI Mode (in Search), they're different products built by fairly different part of Google (actually one if built by Deepmind).
(I don't think it's much comparable to https://gemini.google.com/app at least in the past you'd get very different results)
It has to be really because think of how fast it has to come up with an answer (ie time for a regular google query) and the immense scale of billions of people querying it many times a day, all for free.
Google apps are the most downloaded apps in the Apple App Store already. This reminds me of the original Apple Maps, which was just a front end for Google Maps.
I'm really not looking forward to Gemini models on my devices.
Gemini models clearly gaslight the user and hallucinate, they're also SUPER verbose, as shown in the demos from the keynote.
Plus, if they're not charging a subscription for this, you know we're getting the dumbest models...
Maybe I'm wrong, but this seems to strongly undercut Apple's claims about privacy.
>The company reiterated that Apple Intelligence relies on on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, with a promise that user data is only used to execute the immediate request and is not accessible to Apple or third parties. Apple added that outside experts can verify those privacy guarantees "at any time."
If you want to independently audit it from the outside, then you might not be an expert for Apple
> Apple added that outside experts can verify those privacy guarantees "at any time."
To my understanding, these "outside experts" have to go through a vetting process by Apple first. There are no publicly available audits of the infrastructure planned right now.
This move kind of reminds me of the original iPhone with google maps. You're competing with google, but you're using their infrastructure. Why wouldn't they just go with another provider like OpenAI or Anthropic?
To be fair, with the original iPhone they weren't competing. Google did backend web stuff well, so Apple partnered with them and made nice local apps that were fed by Google's cloud data. The same was true for the YouTube app.
After Google saw the iPhone (before the public), they pivoted their vision for Android (it was originally on blackberry-style hardware), and that's when the "thermonuclear war" started. Kind of interesting Steve Jobs would have showed the iPhone off like that, when something very similar happened with Bill Gates, which prompted the development of Windows (according to Jobs).
19 years later, it's probably time to be pragmatic again. If Apple isn't able to deliver on some of these AI integrations into the OS, they risk losing users to Android. If they have to pay someone for a model, they might as well choose the one they think is going to be best for their users. This keeps existing iPhone users on iPhone, and may pull over some Android users looking for the same features, but with better privacy. That seems like a win for Apple. To pay OpenAI instead of Google would just be spite at this point. Maybe well deserved, but the leadership has all changed over in the last two decades, so they'd be fighting old wars. Though I think they should still think twice before showing Google anything that hasn't yet been released.
Given that they had originally selected OpenAI for Siri, and that deal fell through, I would guess something about their relationship with OpenAI fell through. Maybe OpenAI wouldn't let Apple run their model on Apple's servers.
Google is almost closer to a conglomerate than a coherent horizontally integrated corporation. The individual parts of Google are like Fortune500 companies themselves, and tend to act in their own interest.
OpenAI or Anthropic are not anywhere as well funded as Google. Apple already has everyone in their pocket via the ecosystem, they just have to not crap the bed. They value stability over the competitive component here.
Pretty much all of big tech compete with each other in some areas and partner in others.
Google probably gave them the best deal. When you're the #3 player you'll sacrifice margins to drive volume.
not just google maps but google search itself has been on the iphone since it launched
Are they competing with Google?
What do you consider Android to be, if not a competitor of iOS?
yeah or Magento teaming up with the X-Men to defeat the military in X2. XD
Wait, if it's Gemini why do they call it "Apple Intelligence"? Is Google okay with that?
Google sold Apple the ability to run certain Gemini models on Apple's data-center hardware, using Google's orchestration layer. Apple hooks into that not dissimilar from an API-provider, and then builds everything upstream.
Meaning the system prompt(s), harness, entry and exit points, and skills. So the product is still "Siri AI", because of all the stuff that takes it from a raw infrastructure concern upon up into a "product" is Apple's responsibility.
Google are "okay with that" because Apple pays them $1B a year, per press reports, to be.
Any business can do this now actually - you just need to lease/rent hardware through a Google partner and you can run an Nvidia based server in your own datacenter running (supposedly) the latest full Gemini models.
There's loads of AI features out there that are powered by a model provider, yet are not branded by them. Why would this be different?
If iCloud is implemented on Google Cloud Storage, why do they call it iCloud?
People keep saying Gemini but it's not clear that the models are Gemini. They might be separate models.
I don't think you conceptualize Google's game plan. all these companies care about is b2b contracts so they can inflate their balance sheets because when it's digital, it doesn't have to actually exist for it to "make money"
Maybe now we'll get a good voice prompt experience with Gemini on iPhone out of this deal.
So they run on TPUs and not Nvidia chips?
No, Siri runs on Apple Silicon.
Thanks. That's still very interesting that they don't need Nvidia to do any of this. Nvidia stock has been priced like AI isn't possible without them.
Nvidia's moat is just around high-performance frontier models and CUDA.
You can run smaller models on cheap commodity hardware.
Your phone can probably run one of these:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.ai....
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-ai-edge-gallery/id67496...
what i think why they are too much relying on Google is coz they are way much towards making models open source and launching more much better models to public as if in future apple part way from google they might still have much better models to rely on and if we see the history google has been partnered with Apple since the launch of first Iphone
I honestly don’t understand how anyone can believe that Apple is limiting user options for privacy reasons, rather than trying to maintain an unfair advantage over other vendors.
I’m not saying people who hold this view are being dishonest at all. But sometimes, to me, brands like Harley-Davidson or Apple seem closer to a cult than to a typical corporation.
> ...closer to a cult...
When you have to image a highly irrational reason to explain why groups of people do the things they do, there's a decent chance you just don't understand their perspective. They may be acting reasonably rationally from their own perspective. (As you said yourself: "I honestly don't understand...")
Because privacy is actually a big feature, many people are skeptical about AI and the big model providers and don't trust them. They're less skeptical about on-device AI and so Apple is pushing that and making privacy a core feature of their online offering as well.
I probably wouldn't use it without that. It's one thing sending my shitty code to be trained on, and another thing entirely to give these companies access to my personal life and information.
That still doesn't explain why my data can only be sent to Apple and not to another vendor of my choice.
Because Apple has Private Cloud Compute tech that other vendors do not have.
Apple could have done something like bedrock and used a SOTA model but instead they are fiddling with local models or whatever.
Also I have seen that Apple has some strange lust towards image generation as if that's what people really want. I have this slop image generation thing on my phone and it is useless.
Here's what I want: natural language interaction to achieve complex workflows in iPhone. Example: find the cheapest way to go from A to B and book it using the Deutsche Bahn Train app.
Local Gemini is a light year ahead of whatever Siri is so this is a big improvement already.
If they don’t like this in the future they can just change to the less convenient, less secure, and likely more expensive bedrock + SOTA.
I don't disagree that local Gemini is better but if you've tried it in iPhone, it is slow, hallucinates and overheats the phone. For anything slightly non-trivial like the workflow example I gave, I think it will be close to useless.
Why is Apple providing people with a photorealistic deepfake generator so they can participate in dressing down women, digital blackface, and god knows what else? This is crossing a line, and simply saying "well other big tech companies crossed it first!" is not an excuse.
Nah, they crossed the line when they allowed photo editing apps on the AppStore which can do all the things you listed and more. It’s disgusting.
That is a completely ridiculous and absurd reply, and you know it.