Apple just paid its biggest rival to fix Siri. Here's what that means for your iPhone

For a decade Apple told us it does things its own way. This week at WWDC it showed off the smartest Siri ever, and the brain inside it belongs to Google.

The rebuilt Siri arriving with iOS 27 runs on a custom version of Google's Gemini, a model reported to be 1.2 trillion parameters, under a deal worth around $1 billion a year. Some analysts put the total value at up to $5 billion over the life of the contract.

What you actually get

The new Siri finally delivers the three things Apple promised back in 2024 and kept delaying:

• Personal context. Siri can pull together information from across your phone, so "find the parking ticket Sarah sent me" actually works.
• On-screen awareness. It understands what you're looking at and can act on it.
• Multi-step actions. One request can chain tasks across different apps.

General release is expected in September alongside the new iPhones.

The privacy question

Here's the part most coverage skipped: your requests don't go to Google. Apple runs the Gemini model inside its own Private Cloud Compute system, with end-to-end encryption and hardware isolation. Google supplies the brain; Apple keeps the building. Apple says no user data is shared with Google and nothing is stored after processing.

Why it matters

Apple tried to build this itself and couldn't get it done fast enough. Paying a rival a billion a year is an admission, but it's also the most Apple move imaginable: buy the best component, wrap it in your own privacy story, and ship it to over a billion iPhones. The real loser might be every other assistant. When Siri stops being the punchline, the bar moves for everyone.