Apple pries open siri for every ai rival, betting the iphone becomes the universal remote for chatbots

Apple is about to turn Siri into a switchboard for artificial intelligence, letting any chatbot—Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, Perplexity, you name it—plug straight into the voice assistant that ships with every iPhone. The change, buried inside the forthcoming iOS 27 build, ends a decade-and-a-half policy that kept Siri a walled garden and signals a quiet admission: Apple lost the first wave of the generative-ai war and is now fighting to own the rails instead of the trains.

The gate swings both ways

People familiar with the project say engineers in Cupertino are building a set of APIs that will let third-party bots surface not only through voice (“Hey Siri, ask Claude to summarise this PDF”) but also through the new Siri app, Spotlight search, and a pair of one-tap buttons—“Ask Siri” and “Write with Siri”—that will appear across iOS, iPadOS and macOS. The same APIs feed Apple’s own revenue meter: any subscription upgrade initiated on an Apple device will still run through the company’s in-app purchase system, guaranteeing the 15–30 % cut that already props up Services revenue.

Translation: Apple will happily promote its competitors as long as it gets a slice of the upsell. ChatGPT Plus sign-ups routed through Apple Intelligence have already added low-nine-figure annualised revenue, according to two people who have seen internal dashboards. Multiply that by Google’s Gemini Advanced, Claude Pro and a dozen smaller models and the line item labelled “Siri commissions” could top half a billion dollars inside two years—without Apple spending a dollar on GPU clusters.

Why now? because samsung ate apple’s lunch

Executives inside Apple Park have stopped pretending that Siri’s 2011 head start still matters. Samsung’s Galaxy S24 shipped in January with live translation, on-device summarisation and Google’s Gemini Nano running natively. Google’s Pixel line folds entire Gmail inboxes into conversational threads. Even Xiaomi advertises 7-billion-parameter models that run offline. Meantime, Siri still stumbles when you ask it to set two timers at once.

The lag shows in the numbers. Consumer-intent surveys by Kantar show Siri’s “problem-solving” satisfaction score dropped 14 points in the past 18 months while ChatGPT’s rose 22. Among US teens—the cohort that dictates tomorrow’s defaults—Siri usage fell below 50 % for the first time this spring. Apple can’t afford another cycle of ridicule.

Behind the curtain: a 300-person swat team

Apple assembled the Siri Re-architecture Task Force (SRT) last autumn, pulling engineers from the cancelled car project, the Vision Pro mixed-reality group and the Core ML team that once tuned silicon for Face ID. Their mandate: decouple Siri’s front end from its back end so any model can slide in like a cartridge. The group reports to Robby Walker, a senior director who previously ran Apple’s cloud infrastructure and now holds the unofficial title of “Siri plumber-in-chief.”

Walker’s team already demoed a version of iOS 27 where Spotlight search queries are routed to whichever model scores highest on a 200-millisecond latency test. If the user has Gemini installed and a fast Wi-Fi connection, the query goes to Google; if the device is on a slow cellular link, the on-device Ajax model field-tested last autumn takes over. The hand-off is invisible, logged only as a new category in Apple’s differential-privacy analytics.

China complicates everything

Opening Siri to external ai also means kowtowing to Beijing. Tim Cook told China Daily on Monday that Apple “remains deeply committed to local innovation,” a nod to the fact that ChatGPT is still banned on the mainland. Expect a separate stack for Chinese iPhones where Baidu’s Ernie Bot and Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen replace OpenAI and Google. Revenue share there is murkier—Chinese regulators cap app-store commissions at 15 %—but the user base is 220 million iPhones strong and growing again after last year’s Huawei scare.

Developers get a new lever

The same APIs that let Apple pocket subscription revenue will let any App Store chatbot request microphone, notification and Spotlight access in a single prompt. Early testers say conversion rates for premium tiers jump 28 % when the upsell appears inside Siri rather than inside the app—humans trust the voice that ships with the phone. That is why Notion, Duolingo and Adobe are already re-writing their onboarding flows to end with “Add to Siri” instead of “Enable notifications.”

Bottom line: a quiet monopoly swap

Apple never needed to win the generative-ai arms race; it just needed to own the toll plaza. By turning Siri into a neutral broker, Cupertino concedes the crown of best model while keeping the throne of best distribution. Every time you shout at your phone, Apple will decide who answers—and collect rent either way. The revolution will be intermediated.