Apple bet big that it could buy its way into the AI race. So far, it's getting a very expensive lesson in why that's harder than it sounds.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported that the Gemini-powered Siri overhaul keeps failing Apple's internal tests — falling back to ChatGPT mid-conversation, cutting users off in the middle of sentences, and generally behaving like a voice assistant that doesn't know which brain it's supposed to be using. The result: Apple has now missed its self-imposed deadline for the third time.
This was supposed to be the fix. Last November, Apple struck a deal to pay Google roughly $1 billion a year for access to a custom 1.2 trillion parameter Gemini model — the engine that would finally turn Siri from a glorified egg timer into something that could compete with ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini's own chatbot. The revamped Siri, code-named "Campos," was expected to roll out with iOS 26.4 this spring.
That timeline is now in serious jeopardy.
The delays have become a pattern that would test even the most patient Apple loyalist. At WWDC in June 2024, Apple unveiled a new Siri with on-screen awareness, personal context, and the ability to take action across apps. It was supposed to ship with iOS 18. Then it slipped to April 2025. Then it slipped again. Now, over a year and a half after the original announcement, the features that Apple promised on stage still aren't in anyone's hands.
The core problem isn't just technical — it's architectural. Apple is trying to stitch together its own on-device models, Google's cloud-based Gemini, and OpenAI's ChatGPT into a single coherent assistant. When Siri can't handle a query with Gemini, it's supposed to gracefully hand off to ChatGPT. In practice, according to Gurman's reporting, those handoffs are anything but graceful.
Apple has published its own AI research, including a technical report on its foundation language models, along with work on smaller on-device models. But the company's strategy has been clear: rather than building a frontier model from scratch — the way OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have — Apple chose to be a buyer, not a builder. Tim Cook essentially outsourced the hardest part of the AI race while betting that Apple's ecosystem and hardware would make up the difference.
Meanwhile, the competition isn't standing still. Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S26 Ultra is leaning heavily into agentic AI that can take actions on your behalf directly on the device. And OpenAI is working on its own hardware play — a Jony Ive-designed smart speaker with a camera, slated for 2027. Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, called it "the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen." That's peak Altman hyperbole, but the intent is real: OpenAI wants to live on your kitchen counter, not just your phone.
Ive and Altman have described the device's design philosophy as "peaceful" — an AI presence in your home that's "an active participant" without being intrusive. It's a direct shot at the territory Apple has owned for decades: beautiful hardware that just works.
The irony is thick. Apple — the company that popularized the modern voice assistant with Siri in 2011 — is now scrambling to catch up with the very companies it once inspired. And the billion-dollar check it wrote to Google hasn't accelerated the timeline. If anything, it's added a layer of dependency that's making things harder.
Valley View
Apple's "buy not build" AI strategy made sense on paper: why spend years and billions developing a frontier model when Google already has one? But software integration is where Apple's legendary discipline was supposed to shine, and instead it's where the whole thing is falling apart. The longer Siri stays broken, the more iPhone users build habits around ChatGPT and Claude — habits that won't easily reverse even if Campos eventually ships. Apple still has the most valuable distribution channel in tech, with more than a billion active devices. But distribution only matters if you have something worth distributing. Right now, Apple is paying $1 billion a year for an AI brain that its own body keeps rejecting.