Rumor is that Apple will use an underlying, custom model from Google for the brains of the assistant, and Apple has been looking at it for quite a while.
— The work we’ve done on this end-to-end revamp of Siri has given us the results we needed, said Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software engineering, at an internal all-hands meeting recently, Bloomberg reports, — This has put us in a position to not just deliver what we announced, but to deliver a much bigger upgrade than we envisioned.
Dazzling presentations?
The new Siri will expand on its current capabilities beyond simple Wikipedia and Google answers to multimodal search and digging deep into the web and deliver a comprehensive result, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
It will supply a «quickly digestible» answer that will be much more accurate than the current version, and will use text, pictures, video and local files in the results. Most models can handle this, but if Siri combines them in a single presentation, it could dazzle a few.
Already working with Google
Apple has already received a Gemini model for testing from Google, and both companies are said to be cooperating on fine-tuning and testing.
According to the report, Siri will continue to use Apple’s in-house Apple Foundation Models for searching user data, due to privacy concerns from sharing confidential information over the web.
Apple was apparently close to choosing Anthropic for the underlying LLM on the Siri project, deeming Claude of higher quality than Gemini, but Anthropic demanded more than $1.5 billion per year for its use, the report says.
Follow the money
Google offered better financial terms, and Apple changed its mind — asking Google for a model to use instead.
The current version of Siri uses ChatGPT for complex queries, but the underlying LLM for the new version is much more complex and requires a different level of collaboration.
The revamped assistant should be released as early as March, 2026 in a software update dubbed iOS 26.4.
Read more: Bloomberg’s reporting, additional reporting by MacRumors, writeup on Gizmodo. Discussion on r/Singularity.