Report: Apple to pay Google $1B a year to provide Siri’s updated AI brain

Macworld

A new report from Bloomberg says that Apple is finalizing a deal in which it will pay Google about a billion dollars a year to use its AI technology as the foundation for the long-overdue new Siri.

The new model is essentially a customized version of Google’s Gemini LLM, according to Mark Gurman’s report. Apple reportedly evaluated Claude and ChatGPT earlier this year and zeroed in on Google to create an LLM based on its Gemini model.

The version Apple will employ will have 1.2 trillion parameters, in comparison to the 150 billion parameters of the cloud-based Apple Intelligence model used today. The number of parameters is one measure of the size and complexity of an AI model, but not the only one. It’s not clear how many parameters are in today’s leading LLMs like Gemini 2.5 Pro or ChatGPT 5, as most of the leading AI developers have stopped publishing such details. According to estimates, a 1.2-trillion parameter model would be well in line with the leading AI models today.

Apple still intends to use its own technology in the future. This deal is said to be an interim solution until the homemade Siri model is good enough to replace it.

This new Gemini model will handle Siri’s summarizer and planner functions—the parts that allow Siri to understand what is being asked of it and how it should execute tasks. Some Siri functions would still use Apple’s in-house models, it is claimed. The partnership may be short-lived, however. Apple’s team is said to already be working on a 1 trillion parameter model that it hopes to have ready for public use “as early as next year,” and Apple execs believe they can match the quality of Google’s custom Gemini model.

The big Gemini model will run on Apple’s own Private Cloud Compute hardware rather than Google’s servers, so Apple can ensure user privacy and that no user data ever gets into Google (or anyone else’s) hands. In China, where most Google technology is banned, the new Siri will in-house models with a custom filter that adjusts content to comply with Chinese government demands.

The new Siri is still said to be scheduled for release in the spring, with Apple aiming to bring it to users in the OS 26.4 releases, which usually arrive in March.