Apple opens siri to rival ais: ios 27 will broker your next chatbot deal
Apple is about
to do something it has never done with its crown jewel: invite the enemy inside. Sources tell me iOS 27, landing this fall, will let Siri hand your questions directly to Claude, Gemini or any chatbot you already downloaded, flipping a decade of walled-garden policy on its head.The power play behind the pivot
Regulators in Brussels barked first. Then ChatGPT swallowed search queries Apple couldn’t monetize. The calculus inside Cupertino shifted: better to skim 15-30 % from every ai subscription sold through the App Store than watch users open Safari and leave the ecosystem entirely.
Developers will get a new Siri Extensions toolkit, quietly circulating in beta labs this week. If an app adopts the plug-in, a simple “Ask Claude” suffix will reroute the request, display the answer inside Siri’s own canvas, and log the interaction in Apple’s private cloud, not the chatbot maker’s. Translation: Apple keeps the data, the partner keeps the customer, and the user keeps the illusion of choice.
How the money moves
Every paid upgrade—$20 monthly for ChatGPT Pro, $19.99 for Gemini Advanced—will now route through Apple’s in-app purchase pipeline. Back-of-the-envelope math: if 50 million power users upgrade, the toll booths collect roughly $1.8 billion a year without Apple shipping a single extra transistor.
The move also kneecaps Google’s rumored $20 billion Safari deal. Why pay for default search placement when Apple can host rival AIs, skim revenue, and still sell ads inside Spotlight?
The unfinished overhaul
Don’t confuse openness with surrender. Apple’s own large-language-model Siri, built on a home-brewed Ajax framework plus licensed Gemini Nano, remains the star of WWDC 2026. The third-party parade is a stopgap—an insurance policy while Apple’s 2,000-person ai division races to ship on-device reasoning that doesn’t drain the battery in 20 minutes.
Late-night labs are stress-testing a “Siri app” icon that can live on the dock, replacing the ephemeral overlay we have today. Engineers call it Project Blackwood. If it ships, the voice assistant graduates from utility to platform—an Alexa moment, five years late but with a billion devices already in pockets.
What changes this fall
Open Settings → Apple Intelligence & Siri → Extensions and you’ll see toggles for every certified chatbot. Toggle on Perplexity for citations, Claude for long-form writing, Gemini for multimodal search. The list will reorder automatically based on which service you used last, a gentle nudge toward habit—and recurring revenue.
The first beta drops in July for developers; public release tracks the iPhone 17 line. Expect a marketing blitz that borrows the old “There’s an app for that” cadence, now twisted into “There’s a bot for that.”
Apple’s sudden magnanimity ends the moment its own models catch up. When Ajax can answer faster than ChatGPT without sending a single byte to the cloud, the Extensions menu will quietly gray out. Until then, Cupertino cashes the referral checks and learns from every query it intermediates. Call it a strategic retreat disguised as a feature—classic Apple choreography, just with someone else’s script on stage.