Apple is reportedly finalizing a deal to pay Google roughly $1 billion a year for its ultrapowerful Gemini AI model, in an effort to power its long-promised overhaul of the Siri voice assistant.
The news indicates that after evaluating models from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, Apple has honed in on Google to handle core functions for the redesigned Siri.
The move marks a massive and pragmatic admission from the tech giant: its own in-house AI isn't ready, and Siri needs a fix, fast.
To understand the strategy behind this billion-dollar deal, I discussed with SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute founder and CEO Paul Roetzer on Episode 179 of The Artificial Intelligence Show.
Under the reported arrangement, Google's AI will handle Siri's new “summarizer” and "planner" functions, helping the assistant understand context and execute complex tasks.
This overhaul, internally code-named "Linwood," is slated for release next spring. Using Google’s AI won't mean your data is being sent to the company. The Google model is expected to run on Apple's own Private Cloud Compute servers, keeping user data separate.
This is meant as a short-term fix. While Apple continues developing its own trillion-parameter model, it's using Google's best-in-class technology as a bridge to get its new Siri to market.
From a business perspective, the move signals a major strategic pivot for Apple, which has historically prided itself on building its entire tech stack in-house.
The reality, however, is that Apple has fallen behind in the generative AI race.
“I think they're just accepting that they're not a frontier lab,” says Roetzer. “They're not going to build to compete with Gemini 3.”
Faced with this choice between pride and progress, Apple is choosing progress.
“They need to fix Siri badly,” Roetzer says. “And they've accepted that they just aren't going to get there on their own” quickly enough.
This deal solves an immediate, cloud-based problem, but Apple's future is likely on-device.
“My guess is Apple is going to focus on building these more efficient, smaller models that can run on a device," says Roetzer.
By paying Google to handle the heavy lifting in the cloud for now, Apple buys itself time to perfect the smaller, hyper-efficient models that will define the on-device AI experience, preserving its core values of privacy and integration.
Ultimately, the partnership "makes a ton of business sense," says Roetzer.
Apple's investors and users are not AI purists; they just want products that work. The company's failure to deliver a competent voice assistant has been a long-running frustration, and this deal is the most direct path to solving it.
“I think Apple investors are just like, fix it,” says Roetzer. “We don't care if it's your model or not.”