Siri AI finally works, because Apple pays Google a billion dollars a year

Apple opened the public beta of iOS 27 on July 13, and with it, the first widely available build of the new Siri. The marketing story was ready to go: two years of delays, finally paid off. The real picture looks different. The assistant Apple is holding up as proof of its own AI competence runs, at the point that matters most, on a model it rents from Google, under a deal reported at roughly a billion dollars a year.

That is not a footnote buried in a licensing agreement. It is basically the whole story of this release.

Apple decided that shipping a great assistant powered by Google was better than shipping a mediocre one powered by Apple.

What actually changed in this build

The new Siri finally gets its own standalone app, something it never had before. It can be triggered by voice, the side button, or a swipe down from Dynamic Island, and it now also powers Spotlight search, so it answers nearly anything typed into the system search bar, not just phone-specific queries.

The assistant holds context across a conversation: it understands follow-up questions, reads what is on the screen, and runs multi-step actions inside apps instead of just opening them and stopping at the door. In hands-on testing it found specific photos in a library, summarized a long group text thread, added a calendar event mentioned inside a text message, and looked up nutrition facts for whatever was in the camera's view.

Two years of promises before any of this shipped

Apple first showed a "more personalized Siri" at WWDC in June 2024, targeting a 2025 launch. That slipped to the iOS 18.4 update in April 2025, then got pushed again in March of that year to an unspecified "coming year." December 2025 brought a leadership shakeup in Apple's AI division: John Giannandrea, the longtime head of machine learning, retired, with Siri development having already moved under Craig Federighi's software group. Amar Subramanya, previously at Microsoft and Google, joined around the same time as the new VP of AI reporting directly to Federighi.

Only on January 12, 2026 did Apple and Google announce the multi-year deal putting a dedicated Gemini model behind both the rebuilt Siri and the next generation of Apple Intelligence. Six months later, that deal reached ordinary users in a public beta.

The engine underneath, but not on Google's servers

Bloomberg and MacRumors put the deal at roughly a billion dollars a year for access to a dedicated Gemini build estimated at around 1.2 trillion parameters. One technical detail is easy to miss: Google didn't just hand Apple API access, it licensed the actual model weights, which means Apple runs inference on its own infrastructure, inside Private Cloud Compute, rather than routing queries to Google's servers. That is a real distinction from the simple "Siri calls Google for the answer" version of this story.

Apple keeps developing its own Foundation Models framework, running on-device on Apple Silicon, but that framework mostly covers developer APIs and simple on-device tasks. The consumer-facing flagship features Apple demos on stage lean, at the moments that matter most, on a model Apple didn't build itself.

Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo put it bluntly: since Apple is paying for the same engine its rivals use, Siri has to outclass Google Gemini, not just catch up after two years of delay. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman takes a more practical view and calls it a pragmatic capitulation. Both takes are correct, they just answer different questions. Kuo is asking whether this defends Apple's position long-term. Gurman is asking whether it works for the user this month.

The same mechanism a court already called illegal once

There's another angle to this deal Apple talks about less. Google has paid Apple for years to be the default search engine in Safari, and a US federal court ruled in the ongoing antitrust case that payments totaling roughly $38 billion in 2021 and 2022 amounted to illegal maintenance of a search monopoly, specifically by buying default placement. The Gemini deal is not formally exclusive, but in practice it puts Google's AI in the single most valuable spot available: the default brain behind the assistant on hundreds of millions of iPhones. Lawyers tracking the case draw a direct line to the search precedent, because the lesson from that ruling was simple: in digital markets, defaults matter more than formal exclusivity.

Why Google agreed to this at all

From Apple's side, the deal is easy to explain: a missing piece bought ready-made instead of built from scratch over several more years. It's harder to explain why Google agreed to arm a direct hardware competitor with its own best language model instead of keeping that edge for Pixel and its own services.

The answer mirrors the logic behind the old search deal: a guaranteed, massive licensing revenue stream is worth more than a narrow hardware edge for Pixel, which sells at a fraction of iPhone's scale anyway. Google also gets something no marketing campaign could buy: Gemini becomes part of the daily experience for hundreds of millions of iPhone users who would never knowingly choose a product with Google's logo on it. For Apple, this plugs an awkward hole in the lineup. For Google, it means its AI model is everywhere, even inside devices that officially compete with it.

Does the new Siri actually work better

Side-by-side testing has gone better for Apple than most expected after two years of delay. One comparison found Siri AI answering a question about a specific restaurant's opening hours in a single request, while Gemini on a Pixel needed roughly five minutes of back-and-forth clarification. Once it identified the restaurant, Siri pulled live data from the web instead of relying on a model's outdated training knowledge.

Critics have a fair point that's hard to wave away, though: some of the features Apple is showing off now, like reading what's on your screen or pulling an address out of a text message, are the exact same features the company promised back in 2024. Google's Pixel has been doing similar things for over a year. Apple didn't leapfrog the competition, it finally caught up to it, and paid that competitor directly for the privilege.

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