Apple is set to launch a new AI web search tool for Siri using Google’s Gemini model
Apple is reportedly preparing a major overhaul of Siri with a new AI-powered search tool called World Knowledge Answers. The feature will let Siri summarize web content with text, images, videos, and points of interest directly from searches, providing more dynamic and personalized responses.
To enable this, Apple has reached a formal agreement with Google to test a custom version of its Gemini AI model, which could run on Apple’s servers. This places Siri in direct competition with other AI search engines like Perplexity and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The strategy could represent a setback for OpenAI, which has been the first and only official partner integrated into Apple Intelligence, since the expansion of competing LLMs within Apple’s ecosystem could gradually reduce its central role across the company’s devices
Apple plans to handle private on-device searches with its own models while evaluating external systems such as Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude for planning functions. The new Siri will combine a planner for interpreting prompts, a search system for scanning data, and a summarizer for results. The update, delayed from earlier plans, is expected to launch with iOS 26.4 by March, aligning with the iPhone 17 release cycle.
Comments
Weird at first, but honestly not that surprising. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, even OpenAI—they’re not really enemies like people think. Apple-Microsoft saved each other back in the ’90s, Apple and Google have worked together on search, services, and mobile, and now Apple is rolling in some OpenAI stuff.
All this “competition” is mostly for show. Behind the scenes, it’s just a bunch of giants protecting their turf and keeping others out. Apple and Google might look like rivals, especially on smartphones, but they’re probably closer than anyone realizes.
The explanation is much more straightforward: Apple rarely invest in technologies before they get some level of maturity, being AI, or dedicated cards for AI (used to be GPUs). Now that the whole AI thing starts slow-paced, the whole infrastructure has been built, and no breakthrough will come soon, some over-valuated companies (like OpenAI and Nvidia) will start deflated, and Apple would be able to big load of second hand Nvidia cards for much less that Microsoft, Google, Facebook/Meta and Amazon have paid for, plus specialized labor laid off to build a new Apple computing-center in few years. During so Apple needs, for privacy reason, to run (i.e. only infer) a model on their own servers, what OpenAI doesn't offer (Microsoft gets all the rights on this) neither Anthropic (baked by Amazon), and Facebook has already started to reduce investments in AI. Google has already pushed Gemini on Android devices, so on a great scale, and the company won't disappear in the next few years, making it the only candidate out there.