For the past few months, Apple has been mired in a tangled legal web of its own making.
When the tech giant released the iPhone 16 back in September of 2024, it promised customers a suite of shiny new “Apple Intelligence” features, which would “roll out later this year and in the months following.” At the crux of the sales pitch was a commitment to release an AI-powered version of Siri — in other words, a large language model (LLM) upgrade to Siri’s ancient algorithm — which the company said could autonomously complete “mundane tasks” for users on its own.
Spoiler alert: Siri never got its AI overhaul. Instead, Apple shareholders and customers slapped the company with a series of lawsuits for misleading the world about high-tech changes coming to those who shelled out for the new phone, which retailed for $799 at the time.
Since its release, the company has kicked the can down the road. In early June, it announced it was delaying Siri’s new update until at least 2026, to avoid further disappointing customers.
Not even a month later, new reporting by Bloomberg has revealed, Apple is admitting defeat. Instead of finishing what it started in-house, the company is apparently in talks with AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic to power Siri using their tech, walking back everything it’s promised over the past nine months.
Anonymous sources told Bloomberg that Apple had asked both companies to train versions of their LLMs to run on Apple’s cloud platform, likely so it can test them for mass adoption. Anthropic is the unofficial favorite so far, as sources noted Siri chief Mike Rockwell and his fellow executives felt Anthropic’s Claude would best align with Apple.
Though Apple hasn’t officially chosen which direction to go, a third-party AI partnership would be taken by investors and customers alike as a major failure for one of the world’s largest tech companies to keep pace with its peers.
Zooming out a bit, the move may signal that Apple’s feeling the pressure from years of unchecked AI hype, and is deciding to settle into a safer, support-oriented role. In February, Apple announced it would invest $500 billion on tech manufacturing in the US over the next four years, including a 250,000 square foot server-building facility in Houston and an engineering academy in Detroit.
And in June — coincidentally around the time it announced it was pushing Siri’s upgrade to 2026 — the company’s Machine Learning Research lab released a white paper declaring that the broader AI industry was massively overhyping the abilities of top AI models.
That included OpenAI’s claims that its leading chatbots can “reason,” something its CEO Sam Altman has increasingly used as a sales tactic to draw in more users.
Put together, Apple’s moves make it the largest tech company to start second-guessing the red hot AI hype that we’ve seen so far. Whether it serves as a bellwether for further decoupling, or stands alone for now, remains to be seen.
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