New Siri 2026: Apple's WWDC Reveal and the $1B Gemini Deal

TL;DR — At its WWDC 2026 keynote on June 8, Apple finally unveiled "Siri AI," a ground-up rebuild of its assistant powered by a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter version of Google's Gemini. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman pegs the multi-year licensing deal at roughly $1 billion a year, confirmed by both companies in January. Siri routes requests across three tiers — on-device, Apple's Private Cloud Compute, and a large cloud model — and ships in a gated beta later in 2026 before a wider rollout this fall with iOS 27. It was also Tim Cook's last keynote as CEO.

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The headline: Siri, rebuilt on Gemini

For two years Apple promised a smarter Siri and then quietly pushed it back. At WWDC 2026, the company stopped apologizing and shipped a plan. The keynote's centerpiece was "Siri AI," a rebranded, rebuilt assistant that Apple confirms runs on a custom version of Google's Gemini model rather than on Apple's own foundation models alone.

This is the moment reporters had circled for months. The pairing of Apple's most personal interface with its longest-standing search rival is, by any measure, a strategic about-face. Apple evaluated models from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic before settling on Gemini for the core reasoning work, according to reporting from CNBC and Bloomberg.

The new Siri is meant to be conversational and capable in ways the old one never was. In Apple's demos it added photos to specific albums, set multi-step reminders, suggested recipes from what was on screen, and answered follow-up questions without losing the thread. Visually, Siri now animates inside the Dynamic Island, and you can summon it with "Hey Siri," the power button, or a swipe down from the center of the screen in iOS 27. There is also a dedicated assistant app for text and image generation and file analysis — the kind of chatbot surface Apple has conspicuously lacked.

If you have been comparing assistants while Apple sat on the sidelines, our Gemini vs ChatGPT showdown covers how the two engines now powering much of the industry actually differ in practice.

The $1 billion Google deal, in plain terms

The financial spine of all this is a licensing agreement that Bloomberg's Mark Gurman first reported in November 2025 and both companies confirmed on January 12, 2026. The widely cited figure is approximately $1 billion per year, with multiple outlets describing a multi-year arrangement.

What Apple is licensing is not the consumer Gemini app. It is a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter model built to Apple's specifications. For scale, that is reported to be roughly eight times larger than the cloud models Apple had been running, and it uses a mixture-of-experts design, meaning only a relevant subset of those parameters activates for any given query. That architecture keeps the model fast and comparatively efficient despite its size.

Crucially, this is a back-end engine swap, not a co-branding exercise. There is no Gemini logo in Siri, no "powered by Google" splash screen. Most users will never know which company's math answered their question — which is precisely how Apple wants it.

How requests actually flow: three tiers

The part worth understanding is where your words go after you talk to Siri. Apple describes a three-tier routing system that decides, per request, how much firepower a query needs.

The first two tiers are uncontroversial and consistent with the Private Cloud Compute architecture Apple introduced in 2024, where servers process data in memory only and Apple says nothing is retained. The third tier is where coverage diverges, and it is worth being precise about what is and isn't confirmed.

Some outlets, including TechTimes, report that the heaviest queries route to Google Cloud running on Nvidia Blackwell B200 GPUs. Others, including an infrastructure analysis from Introl, report that inference runs on Apple's own Private Cloud Compute systems rather than Google Cloud. Apple's public messaging emphasizes the Private Cloud Compute privacy model and says Siri requests sent to the licensed model are anonymized — stripped of identifiers, IP addresses masked — and that the contract forbids Google from training on Apple traffic. The exact split of where the largest model physically runs is still being clarified in reporting, so treat any single hosting claim with caution until Apple publishes more technical detail.

Everything else Apple announced at WWDC 2026

Siri dominated the keynote, but Apple shipped a full slate across iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27 (Golden Gate), watchOS 27, and visionOS 27.

• Apple Intelligence, broadened. Smart tab organization and price-drop alerts in Safari, one-tap password strengthening, smart replies in Messages and Mail that mimic your writing style, and AI-assisted editing plus image expansion in Photos.
• A rebuilt search foundation. Apple says it re-engineered the underlying search that powers Spotlight, Mail, and Photos for more stability and speed.
• Liquid Glass, dialed back. The 2025 design language gets a customizable opacity slider after readability complaints, alongside cleaner, more uniform toolbars on macOS.
• homeOS preview. Developers got an early look at homeOS, paired with a long-rumored HomePad — a HomePod-style speaker with a roughly 7-inch display and an A18 chip — reportedly targeting a fall launch.
• Performance and family features. Faster AirDrop and app launches, full-resolution iCloud shared albums across Android and Windows, and stricter default child accounts for users under 13.

The catches: availability, devices, and the EU

This is not shipping today. Apple says Siri AI arrives first as a gated beta later in 2026, with a wider public release this fall as part of the iOS 27 family. Feature rollout is gradual rather than all at once.

Hardware support is the usual Apple cut line. Siri AI and the new Apple Intelligence features require an iPhone 16 or later, or an iPhone 15 Pro or 15 Pro Max, plus iPads and Macs with M1 or newer chips. (Plain iOS 27 reaches older phones; the AI layer does not.)

Then there is Europe. Apple says Siri AI will not launch in the EU on iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 initially, citing the Digital Markets Act, though it does plan to offer it on macOS 27 and visionOS 27 in the region. EU iPhone users, in other words, are again waiting on a regulatory standoff to clear.

If you would rather not wait — or want a backup while the beta stabilizes — our roundup of the best free ChatGPT alternatives for 2026 covers assistants you can use on any phone today, and our head-to-head on GPT-5.5 vs Gemini 3.1 vs Claude Fable 5 breaks down which frontier model leads on the kinds of tasks the new Siri is promising.

A keynote that doubled as a goodbye

The event carried an unusual weight beyond the product news. Apple confirmed this was Tim Cook's final WWDC keynote as chief executive; he transitions to executive chairman on September 1, 2026, with hardware engineering chief John Ternus reported to take over as CEO. Closing his last keynote by outsourcing Siri's brain to Google is a fittingly pragmatic note for a leader who built Apple's empire on operations and partnerships rather than demos.

The bottom line

WWDC 2026 was Apple admitting, in the most expensive way possible, that it could not build a competitive frontier assistant alone fast enough — so it rented one. A ~$1 billion-a-year deal for a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter Gemini model is a remarkable concession from a company that prizes vertical control, but it is also the most credible path Apple has shown to a Siri people actually trust. The privacy architecture is genuinely careful, the device and EU restrictions are real, and the precise hosting details still need Apple's confirmation. The honest verdict arrives this fall, when the beta meets a billion-plus phones and we find out whether borrowed intelligence finally fixes Apple's most embarrassing product.