Apple now pays Google somewhere around $1 billion a year. Not for search placement on Safari, not for Maps data — for the right to run a version of Gemini underneath the assistant that couldn't reliably set a timer for the better part of a decade. That's the headline of the multiyear deal Apple and Google announced back in January. The strange part is what happened next: the rebuilt Siri that deal paid for is actually good.
What Apple actually bought
Apple and Google made the partnership official on January 12, 2026, describing it as a multiyear agreement to power a rebuilt Siri and the next wave of Apple Intelligence features. Neither company published the contract, but the number that's circulated since — about $1 billion annually — tells you how much Apple wanted this fixed. Apple's own statement leaned on a specific phrase: after "careful evaluation," Google's AI "provides the most capable foundation" for Apple's models. That's about as close as a company like Apple gets to admitting its homegrown effort came up short.
The new Siri arrived with iOS 27, and it's not a wholesale replacement. Simple, on-device requests — timers, texts, quick lookups — still run locally, the way Siri always has. It's the harder stuff, the questions that need real reasoning or broad world knowledge, that get routed out to the licensed Gemini model.
The verdict, from someone who's hated Siri for years
Joanna Stern has built a reputation on being unimpressed by Apple's AI promises, so her verdict carries weight. She spent a week living with the new Siri and posted the results in June. On a beach trip, she asked it for souvenir ideas for her kids — Siri pulled context from her Messages thread and returned specific, usable suggestions instead of a generic gift list. Asked to plan her workday, it cross-referenced her calendar, email, and voicemail without being told which app to check.
Siri is good. Like good-good. After years of broken promises, Apple's rebuilt the foundation it needs for the future.
Joanna Stern, Wall Street Journal
The rebuilt Siri leans on personal context pulled from Messages, calendar, and email — not just a bigger model. · Unsplash
Why Apple needed someone else's AI
Context matters here. Apple delayed the original AI-powered Siri overhaul out of iOS 18 entirely, then spent two more years watching ChatGPT and Gemini pull ahead on the kind of reasoning tasks Siri kept failing. Meanwhile the AI assistant wars kept escalating on every front — OpenAI priced GPT-5.6 80% cheaper just weeks after launch to keep developers from wandering, Meta reversed its own closed-model strategy rather than cede ground, and OpenAI is even betting the next interface won't be a phone at all, pricing its Jony Ive-designed hardware at $400. Apple, sitting on the install base every AI company wants access to, didn't have the luxury of waiting for its own foundation models to catch up organically.
The privacy tightrope
Handing Siri's hardest questions to a Google model is the kind of move that should worry anyone who bought an iPhone partly for Apple's privacy marketing. Apple's answer is Private Cloud Compute — the server architecture, running on Apple silicon, that it built specifically so cloud AI requests never have to trust a third party directly.
Requests that need Gemini's reasoning are anonymized before they leave Apple's servers.
Google has said it does not use Siri queries to train future Gemini models.
Apple retains control over which requests get routed out, and keeps simpler tasks entirely on-device.
No raw personal data tied to your identity is stored on Google's side, according to Apple's own description of the deal.
That's Apple's claim, not an independent audit. It's also the same kind of claim Apple has made about on-device processing for years, and mostly kept. Worth watching, not worth panicking over yet.
Common questions about the new Siri
Is Siri now just Gemini with an Apple logo on it?
No. Apple still brands and controls the assistant end to end. Simple requests stay entirely on-device; only complex reasoning tasks get routed through a licensed Gemini model inside Apple's Private Cloud Compute.
Which iPhones get the new Siri?
The full Apple Intelligence feature set, including the Gemini-backed reasoning, requires iOS 27 on an iPhone 15 Pro or newer as of mid-2026.
Does Google get to keep my data?
Apple says no — queries are anonymized before being sent, and Google is contractually barred from using them to train its own models.
Is this connected to Apple's lawsuit against Jony Ive's startup?
Reported figures put it around $1 billion a year, though neither company has confirmed exact contract terms.
Verdict
Worth the hype?
For the first time since Apple started promising an AI-powered Siri, the independent hands-on reviews match the marketing. It's not flawless, and the privacy trade-off deserves real scrutiny over time rather than a one-week test — but if you gave up on Siri years ago, this is the first version worth actually trying again.
Best for: iPhone owners who muted their expectations for Siri a long time ago
What to watch next: whether Apple extends the same Gemini-backed features to older hardware, whether Google's leverage over Apple's AI roadmap grows now that it's load-bearing, and whether Apple's own foundation models ever close the gap enough to make this deal temporary rather than permanent. Nothing about a $1 billion annual contract suggests either company expects that soon.
