Report: Apple considers squeezing Gemini into the Siri brain

Bloomberg is reporting that Apple is looking at Gemini to power SiriApple Intelligence's best bits are still delayed until possibly 2026No confirmation from either company, and the report put discussions at the earliest stagesApple's efforts to deliver the smarter Siri and full Apple Intelligence we were promised "in the coming year" might get a boost from an unlikely third party if Bloomberg's latest report is true. The iPhone maker is reportedly in early-stage exploratory talks about integrating Gemini in Siri.There aren't many details beyond that, though Bloomberg's Mark Gurman contends that the shift to these Google chats happened after Apple couldn't reach financial terms with Anthropic (maker of Claude AI).The possibility of Apple using Gemini's much more accomplished generative AI and one of its models (Gemini Pro, Flash, Lite?) to bring the conversational intelligence lacking in Siri would immediately transform Apple's nearly 15-year-old digital assistant into a more able AI tool, but it would also mean that Apple is ceding control in what is a key digital arms race.How we got hereWhile working with third parties has always been a part of Apple Intelligence's strategy, Apple's CEO Tim Cook and the company's development leadership have never mentioned ingesting someone else's generative AI models. It's also a fact that Apple Intelligence's rollout has not gone exactly according to plan.(Image credit: Shutterstock)In TechRadar's conversation at WWDC 2025 with Apple's Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi, who is also now running Apple's AI development efforts, he explained why the company hadn't delivered full Apple Intelligence and a smarter Siri on time. After struggling to get V1 architecture working as they wanted to, Apple had a decision to make:"...fundamentally, we found that the limitations of the V1 architecture weren't getting us to the quality level that we knew our customers needed and expected." He added, "As soon as we realized that [...] we let the world know that we weren't going to be able to put that out, and we were going to keep working on really shifting to the new architecture and releasing something."Gurman, though, contends that Apple is still not fully committed to using its own architecture and models and will soon make the decision about whether or not to outsource to a third party like Google for at least some of the necessary intelligence. Again, the discussions he describes are in the earliest stages. And whatever comes of them, assuming they exist, it's unlikely they will have any impact on the upcoming release of iOS 26, which features a smattering of Apple Intelligence updates but virtually none to Siri.(Image credit: Shutterstock/rafapress)Far from strangersApple and Google are already search partners (Google is Safari's default search engine), and in Apple's Visual Intelligence, where you can choose to use Google to search on captured images (or you can ask OpenAI's ChatGPT about them).Still, Gemini inside Siri would mark a major turning point for Apple and an admission that it's simply not up to the task of competing in the AI sphere, at least not at the level of an OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, or Google.This approach, though, is not unheard of; Microsoft's Copilot is essentially a reskinnning of ChatGPT (though there are questions if Microsoft will continue getting access to OpenAI's best models).Even so, Apple put a lot of effort and marketing into Apple Intelligence. The question is, can it still be called that if a big chunk of it is powered by Google?We contacted Apple and Google for comment. Google had no comment. We'll update this story if and when Apple replies.You might also likeThis is what really happened with Siri and Apple Intelligence, according to AppleI spoke to Apple’s software engineering VP for the inside story on how iPadOS 26 finally became a real Mac alternative15 things we learned at the Apple WWDC 2025 keynote