Apple on Monday rebuilt Siri on top of a custom model co-developed with Google, ending two years of conspicuous generative-A.I. delays by quietly outsourcing the hardest part of the stack to the company it has spent a decade framing as a privacy antagonist. The announcement opened WWDC 2026 at Apple Park in Cupertino and set the frame for everything that followed: a Tim Cook farewell, a new operating-system cycle, and a tacit concession that the world’s most valuable consumer-hardware company couldn’t build a frontier model alone.

The new assistant runs on Apple Foundation Models on Cloud, with its most demanding tier, AFM Cloud Pro, described by Bloomberg’s account of the keynote as comparable in quality to Google’s Gemini Frontier models and running on Nvidia GPUs inside Google’s cloud. “Siri is now a profoundly more capable assistant that helps you find what you need and gets more done,” said Michael Rockwell, the Apple vice president now overseeing the product, adding that it’s “more conversational, so you can go back and forth like never before.” A standalone Siri app arrives on iPad and Mac.

Craig Federighi, the software chief, handled the narrative management. “Some appear to be racing forward, seemingly pursuing A.I. for the sake of A.I., without clear regard to the people, all of us, that it’s ultimately meant to serve,” he said, before pivoting to the privacy guarantee: “data is only used to execute your request, and outside experts can continue to verify this promise at any time.” The subtext is that Apple needs Google’s weights but wants to retain the moral posture of refusing them.

The rest of the slate was incremental. iOS 27, iPadOS 27, tvOS 27, watchOS 27, and visionOS 27 ship alongside macOS 27, internally branded “Golden Gate.” Apple Intelligence expands; a new Passwords behavior navigates to individual sites to rotate insecure credentials on the user’s behalf.

Markets read the choreography clearly. Shares opened up about 2 percent, turned negative during the presentation, and closed down close to 2 percent, per CNBC and NPR. Investors generally don’t reward acknowledgments of dependency.

Cook closed the keynote himself. After 15 years leading Apple, a stretch during which the split-adjusted share price rose roughly 2,000 percent, he confirmed he hands the role to John Ternus on September 1. Ternus didn’t appear onstage. Cook, reportedly wiping a tear, offered the line: “It’s been the honor of a lifetime.”

He leaves his successor an assistant Apple no longer fully owns.

Sources