In a striking strategic pivot, Apple is reportedly close to signing a $1 billion annual deal with its arch-rival, Google. The agreement would allow Apple to use Google’s highly advanced 1.2 trillion parameter Gemini AI model as the new engine for a completely overhauled Siri. This move is seen as a “temporary fix” to address Apple’s significant lag in the generative AI arms race, allowing it to deploy a truly competitive smart assistant by next spring while its own teams work furiously to develop a comparable in-house solution.
The decision to partner with Google was made after an extensive bake-off that included OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Apple’s leadership, including software head Craig Federighi and Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell, ultimately determined that Google’s technology was the best immediate path forward for “Glenwood,” the internal project to fix Siri. The new assistant, code-named “Linwood” and targeting the iOS 26.4 release, will use Gemini’s power to manage its most complex functions, specifically summarization and task planning.
The technical leap is immense. The 1.2 trillion parameters of the custom Gemini model represent a massive increase in complexity and power compared to Apple’s current models, which are believed to be in the 150-billion parameter range. This “ultrapowerful” model will enable Siri to understand nuanced, complex requests and plan multi-step actions in a way that is currently impossible for the assistant. However, some of Siri’s simpler functions will continue to be handled by Apple’s own on-device and cloud models.
A non-negotiable part of the deal for Apple is privacy. The entire Gemini model will be hosted on Apple’s proprietary Private Cloud Compute servers. This critical detail means that while Apple is using Google’s AI “brain,” Google itself will have no access to Apple user data, which remains securely walled off within Apple’s infrastructure. This arrangement allows Apple to leverage Google’s AI superiority without compromising its long-standing privacy-first marketing promise, though it requires Apple to dedicate massive server resources to run the model.
Apple has no plans to publicly advertise this partnership. Google will be treated as a silent, behind-the-scenes supplier, a stark contrast to the company’s visible role as the default search engine in Safari. This underscores Apple’s reluctance to admit its reliance on a competitor. The company is actively working on its own 1 trillion parameter model to replace Gemini, but with Google constantly improving its AI—the 2.5 Pro version already tops many leaderboards—catching up and ending this reliance will be a formidable challenge.