Apple is reportedly overhauling Siri from the ground up while working to distinguish it from the Apple Intelligence branding. After a series of missteps in its AI strategy, the company appears to be shifting to damage control. The so-called “LLM Siri” will have architecture “entirely (built) on an LLM-based engine,” Apple sources told Bloomberg, making it “more believably conversational and better at synthesizing information.”
Apple is exploring ways to improve Siri’s synthesised training data by comparing it to emails from real iPhone users, with the process taking place on-device and only the synthesised data being sent back for AI training. The company is also considering turning Siri into an AI web search tool that could “grab and synthesize data from multiple sources” from the internet, according to Bloomberg.
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The company already announced an AI-augmented Siri at WWDC last year, promising it would respond to natural language commands and have a ChatGPT integration. Although Apple initially said the feature would launch within the year, it has yet to be fully released, with rumours now suggesting it may be delayed until 2026.
A ChatGPT integration was added with iOS 18.2 as a temporary solution, which forwards requests that can’t be handled on-device to OpenAI’s chatbot, along with a few other generative AI tools. Nevertheless, these delays have led to a March class-action lawsuit alleging that Apple misled iPhone 16 buyers with promises of features that have yet to materialise.
According to Bloomberg, the company will no longer market features before they are ready to launch and is “unlikely” to discuss Siri in depth at WWDC 2025. It also seeks to distance Apple Intelligence from Siri to avoid associating its new AI features with Siri’s less-than-stellar reputation.
However, the effort may prove too little, too late. Apple is reportedly considering allowing European Union customers to replace Siri with third-party options, and “many users may make that switch” unless Apple significantly improves its AI offerings.
EU regulations have forced Apple to make a number of pro-competition changes in the past year, such as allowing users to delete pre-installed apps and install third-party app stores. Apple Intelligence was only brought to EU users in April after “regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act” held up its release in the region.
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Apple has been playing catch-up in AI since ChatGPT’s launch
The report from Bloomberg outlines why Apple has been struggling with its AI strategy. Sources claim Apple Intelligence “wasn’t even an idea” before ChatGPT was launched in late 2022, and that head of software engineering Craig Federighi was “reluctant to make large investments in AI” without a clear end goal.
Apple’s AI chief John Giannandrea is also partially to blame. Employees say his less “forceful” leadership style meant he failed to secure early funding and didn’t drive his teams aggressively. He reportedly downplayed OpenAI and Google as competitive threats and believed customers were uninterested in AI assistants, as they often opted to disable them. Giannandrea has since been removed from overseeing Siri, robotics, and product development — a change he is reportedly “relieved” about.
Before committing to a full Siri rebuild, Apple initially planned to bolt generative AI features onto the existing framework. However, that approach quickly fell apart. “You fix one issue, and three more crop up,” an employee told Bloomberg.
