Apple’s New Siri Runs on Custom Google Gemini in $1B Deal
3 min readApple is about to do something it has spent years insisting it would never do: hand the brains of Siri over to Google. Reports ahead of WWDC 2026 say Apple has signed a deal worth roughly $1 billion per year to license a custom 1.2 trillion parameter version of Google Gemini, with the rebuilt voice assistant set to anchor Monday’s keynote on June 8.
The arrangement marks a hard reset for an assistant that has trailed ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude on nearly every public benchmark since the generative AI wave began. Apple’s own foundation models, built under the Apple Intelligence umbrella unveiled at WWDC 2024, have powered on device features like writing tools and summaries. But the company has leaned on a ChatGPT partnership for the harder reasoning tasks Siri could not handle, and even that fallback has felt patchy to many users.
What the deal includes
According to the latest reporting, the new Siri runs on a Google built Gemini variant tuned specifically for Apple, with private cloud compute hosting it inside Apple’s own data centers rather than on Google infrastructure. The 1.2 trillion parameter scale puts it well above today’s standard Gemini Pro tier and gives Siri the headroom to handle multi step requests, longer context, and richer agent behaviors.
Apple is also said to be introducing an Extensions system that lets users pick which model powers Apple Intelligence under the hood. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude are all expected to be supported at launch, with Apple framing Gemini as the default rather than the only option.
Why it matters
Paying a rival roughly $1 billion a year to run your flagship assistant is an extraordinary admission. It signals that Apple has decided shipping a competitive AI experience now is more important than waiting for its in house models to catch up, and it gives Google a powerful new distribution channel into more than a billion iPhones.
For users, the upside is a Siri that should finally feel like a modern AI assistant: better at following context, better at chaining actions across apps, and better at the kinds of tasks ChatGPT and Gemini already do well. The risk is the same one critics have raised about every AI partnership at this scale, namely privacy, model behavior, and how much control Apple really retains. Watch the WWDC keynote closely for how Apple talks about data flows, opt outs, and the boundary between on device and cloud processing.