Apple rebuilds Siri on Google's Gemini, pitches it as an agent at Cook's final WWDC

At WWDC 2026, Apple unveiled a Gemini-powered Siri AI with multi-step tasks, on-screen awareness, and a standalone app — but no launch in the EU or China.

Apple unveiled a rebuilt Siri at WWDC 2026 running on a custom Google Gemini model, with a developer beta shipping the same day as the keynote. After two years of open questions about Apple’s agent strategy, the company answered them by outsourcing the hardest part.

The new Siri AI handles back-and-forth conversation, longer answers, and on-screen awareness on laptops, and it gets a standalone app on iPad and Mac with persistent conversation history. Apple’s pitch is that Siri can now help with “an in-depth plan, go back and forth during creative brainstorm, get feedback on a document, and so much more.” The clearest agentic commitment ships inside the Passwords app, which uses Apple Intelligence and Safari to “agentically take action on your behalf” by rotating insecure credentials without the user in the loop.

Behind the branding, the architecture is more revealing than the demos. Apple’s top-tier cloud model, AFM Cloud Pro, is described by the company as “similar in quality to Gemini Frontier models” and runs on Nvidia GPUs inside Google’s cloud. The partnership was first announced in January. WWDC 2026 was where Apple admitted, in product form, that it wasn’t going to catch up alone.

Craig Federighi staged the contrast with a swipe at the rest of the industry: “Some appear to be racing forward, seemingly pursuing AI for the sake of AI, without clear regard to the people, all of us, that it’s ultimately meant to serve.” The line lands differently when the model underneath your assistant is rented from one of those racers.

Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana told CNN ahead of the event that “Gemini models have been just on a tear.” Markets seemed to agree, then reconsider. Apple shares opened up roughly 2% and turned negative during the presentation.

Siri AI won’t ship in the European Union or China at launch. Apple cited the Digital Markets Act and said in a statement that “EU regulators did not accept any of Apple’s proposed solutions to bring Siri AI to the EU while safely supporting other virtual assistants.”

This was Tim Cook’s last keynote as CEO. John Ternus, the SVP of Hardware Engineering taking over September 1, didn’t appear on stage. The handover is a hardware executive inheriting a software company that just rented its intelligence layer from Google.

Apple rebuilds Siri on Google's Gemini, pitches it as an agent at Cook's final WWDC

Sources