Apple Rewrites Siri on Gemini and Opens iPhone to Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok

Apple Admits to Losing the Race for Proprietary Models

On Monday, in Cupertino, Craig Federighi unveiled the largest overhaul of Siri in 15 years. The assistant has been reconstructed on a customized Gemini model with 1.2 trillion parameters that Apple licenses from Google for about $1 billion per year, according to industry reports released during the keynote. The model runs within Apple’s own Private Cloud Compute infrastructure.

Tim Cook opened and closed the presentation without revealing products. In September, he will hand over the reins to John Ternus, a mechanical engineer who currently leads hardware. This was his last WWDC as CEO.

The most relevant takeaway for a CIO is not the visual redesign or the conversational Siri. It is the vendor table. Apple has replaced the single provider ChatGPT model with a framework called Extensions, which allows users to set Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or Grok as the default AI engine for iOS 27 in system functions. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and xAI now compete for access to over a billion active Apple devices as if it were an App Store for models.

The Financial Take: Paying to Compete

$1 billion per year is market price, not a favor. For comparison, Apple spent about $30 billion on R&D in fiscal year 2025, and the payment Google makes to be the default search on iPhone runs in the neighborhood of $20 billion annually. Licensing Gemini to power Siri publicly acknowledges that Apple’s five-year journey toward a proprietary frontier model has not resulted in a competitive product.

For AI suppliers, the calculus is different. Anthropic and OpenAI gain a distribution channel that would take years to build via direct API. xAI, which still does not have a consolidated enterprise franchise, enters the showcase with Grok alongside Sam Altman and Dario Amodei. Google, which pays to be the preferred supplier in Cupertino, ensures that its architecture is the foundation on which competitors will run.

What Changes for Corporate IT

The rebuilt Siri arrives as a standalone app on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, functioning as a chatbot alongside system integration. The Extensions layer also opens Writing Tools and Image Playground to third-party suppliers through a dedicated store. In a demonstration, Federighi asked the new Siri for a detailed plan to follow the World Cup and refined the request by voice, then switched to text without losing context.

The next MDM update for Apple fleets will require the governance team to decide whether corporate users can freely switch Claude for Gemini or if the department will block everything except the approved provider. Prompts exit the device, go through Private Cloud Compute, and reach the backend of the chosen supplier, and Apple’s technical documentation has yet to detail what the third party sees. Suppliers that currently charge the CIO via API gain a direct channel to employees on corporate iPhones, which could bypass centralized licensing negotiations.

The Signal for the Korean and Indian Markets

The choice of Gemini also reshapes the computing landscape. A 1.2 trillion parameter on-demand model requires inference capacity that Google has at a scale greater than Apple has ever built. South Korea, where SK Hynix provides HBM memory for both Apple and Google infrastructure, gains a more predictable end customer. In India, the impact comes via Bangalore: engineering teams from Anthropic and OpenAI serving global enterprise clients now need to consider guidelines for Indian integrators who will standardize the Extensions setup in the corporate framework of banks and consultancies.

There is a detail that weakens the clear victory thesis for Google. Anthropic and OpenAI have become direct suppliers with the same legitimacy as Mountain View. If one-third of active iPhone users set Claude as default within 12 months and the ChatGPT integration preserves the installed base, Apple will have created a marketplace that neutralizes Google’s trump card. No one in Cupertino calls this an auction, but that is exactly what it is.