Apple ditches its own ai, turns siri into an app store for chatbots
Apple’s home-grown AI is missing in action, so the company is preparing the next-best humiliation: a Siri that rents out its brain to the highest bidder. Instead of shipping Apple Intelligence this spring, the iPhone maker will let users plug in Google Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude and other third-party models through a dedicated AI storefront, according to people familiar with the plan.
The plan turns delay into dollars
The new section, tentatively carved out of the App Store, would let consumers download “personality packs” for Siri—one day Gemini for search, the next Claude for drafting emails, Stable Diffusion for on-device images. Apple keeps the 15-30 % commission it already charges on software, but now on monthly AI subscriptions that can cost $20 a pop. The economics are brutal math: if 200 million power users swap in a Pro tier, the Cupertino giant pockets roughly $1.2 billion a year without writing a single transformer.
Internally the project is codenamed “Agnostic,” a nod to the neutral assistant Apple never wanted to build. Engineers who spoke with Bloomberg say the retrofit is technically trivial—Siri already routes queries through a plug-in architecture introduced in iOS 17. The hard part was swallowing pride. Letting Google’s logo sit inside an iPhone prompt is the clearest admission yet that Apple’s generative efforts, once slated for an October release, remain half-baked.
CEO Tim Cook previewed the philosophical pivot in a little-noticed podcast last week: “We don’t want people living on their phones.” Translation: if outsiders can supply the smarts, Apple can still sell the glass and the silicon while it plays catch-up.
What happens when apple intelligence finally shows up?
Staffers aren’t sure. Some teams push for a hard switch: sunset the external store, funnel everyone to Apple’s own model. Others argue the storefront becomes a permanent buffet line, with Apple Intelligence as just another dish. The second camp is winning for now, sources say, because Wall Street loves recurring revenue more than it hates strategic zig-zags.
The clock is merciless. Samsung ships Galaxy AI next month; Google bundles Gemini directly into Android 15. Every week Apple spends curating chatbots instead of launching its own, the gap widens. The company that once ridiculed rivals for “throwing hardware at the problem” now rents software from them—a humiliation, monetized.