Apple will open WWDC 2026 on Monday at 10 a.m. Pacific by conceding the argument it has spent two years trying to win on its own: that the company most associated with vertical integration can build a competitive large language model in-house. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the rebuilt Siri unveiled at Apple Park will run on a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter Google Gemini model, licensed for roughly $1 billion a year.

The keynote will also be Tim Cook’s last as chief executive. John Ternus assumes the role on September 1.

The Gemini deal is structurally novel. Bloomberg reports the model will run inside Apple’s Private Cloud Compute infrastructure, on Apple Silicon servers, under contract terms that bar Google from training future versions on Apple user queries. The architecture lets Apple market a Google brain as an Apple product, with the privacy story intact, while paying Google for the part it couldn’t build.

That it couldn’t build it’s now the on-record position. At WWDC 2024, Apple promised a Siri that understood on-screen context. At WWDC 2025, Craig Federighi conceded the work “needed more time to reach our high-quality bar.” The feature slipped repeatedly. Mike Rockwell took over the Siri team; John Giannandrea was reassigned. The fifteen-year-old assistant is being handed to its third internal regime in as many years.

The other shoe is the new Extensions framework, which lets users route Apple Intelligence requests to Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or Anthropic’s Claude. Gemini will be the default. OpenAI’s exclusivity, the centerpiece of the Apple Intelligence story shipped in iOS 18, is over.

A standalone Siri app with an iMessage-style chat interface and persistent conversation bubbles is also expected, alongside iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, tvOS 27, watchOS 27, and visionOS 27. The version-number unification follows last year’s Liquid Glass interface refresh. New Apple TV 4K and HomePod mini hardware are, in Gurman’s phrase, “ready to go and just waiting on the new Siri.”

There’s a useful parallel in IBM’s 2014 decision to ship iPads through its enterprise channel, an admission that the mobile platform it had spent years dismissing was now load-bearing. Apple’s version is more expensive and more public. The Dynamic Island will keep animating. The model behind it’ll be Google’s. Cook leaves on the keynote that makes that trade legible.

Sources