Apple finally shipped the Siri rebuild it's been promising for over a year, and the headline feature is that you get to pick which AI does the thinking. Google's Gemini got the default slot. ChatGPT and Claude are demoted to options you have to dig into settings to enable.
At WWDC on Monday, Apple introduced Siri AI, a rebuilt assistant that can actually hold a conversation, take real actions across your apps, and pull in personal context the way ChatGPT does. Apple's software chief Craig Federighi pitched it as a step change in capability, which is the pitch you'd expect for a 2026 assistant after a very public year of delays.
The architecture is the interesting part. Apple's small on-device model handles lightweight stuff like dictation and routing your request. When you ask anything that requires real reasoning or world knowledge, Siri hands the question off to a bigger cloud model. That model, by default, is Gemini. You can switch it to ChatGPT or Claude, but Apple decided who sits at the top of the funnel.
This is the part that stings for OpenAI. Two years ago, when Apple first plugged ChatGPT into Siri, the deal was read as a coronation. ChatGPT was the household name, Apple was the distribution monster, and the two companies were supposedly building something deep. Instead, OpenAI watched Apple construct its flagship AI experience and hand the default slot to Google.
OpenAI executives are not taking it well. Anonymous execs told Bloomberg that Apple asked them to take a leap of faith on the original ChatGPT integration and then never reciprocated, with one saying OpenAI did everything on the product side while Apple "haven't even made an honest effort." Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group put it more bluntly: "No smart person does business with Apple twice," he said. In his read, Apple never planned to actually promote a partner's product, because that simply isn't what Apple does with third parties.
Whether Apple actually delivered a usable Siri this time is a separate question. Francisco Jeronimo, an analyst at IDC, told NPR that if Apple can make AI feel natural and private for mainstream users, it could "redefine what consumers expect from every device they use." That's the optimistic read. The cautious read is that Apple has now promised a transformational Siri twice, and the first one didn't ship.
Apple's "choose your AI" framing looks generous to users, and on the surface it is. The deeper move is that Apple just exempted itself from having to pick a winner in the model wars. Gemini has the default slot today, but defaults change with software updates, and Apple seems perfectly content to let OpenAI and Anthropic keep fighting for the slot underneath. The real losers here aren't iPhone users. They're the model labs that thought getting distribution to a billion iPhones was the prize. Turns out the prize was being a swappable component in someone else's interface.
