Apple's new Siri app has a problem: it's running on Google's AI. So Apple is doing what Apple does best, turning a weakness into a marketing pitch, and the pitch this time is privacy.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports the standalone Siri app will launch in beta next month and offer a ChatGPT-style chatbot experience. Users will be able to start new chats, hold voice conversations, and upload files for Siri to read.
The privacy hook is borrowed from the Messages app, where users can set Siri to auto-delete chats after 30 days, after one year, or keep them forever. That setting will live in the Siri app's Settings panel and is the feature Apple is expected to lean on hardest at its developer conference in June.
Under the hood, the chatbot runs on Google Gemini, but Apple is hosting Gemini on its own private cloud compute servers instead of routing user data straight to Google.
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Apple is behind in AI. The first upgraded Siri was supposed to ship over a year ago and never arrived, and Apple agreed earlier this month to pay $250 million to settle a class action over the delayed features.
Privacy is the lane Apple already owns. Selling Siri as the safer chatbot lets Apple compete with ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini without having to win on raw model quality, which it can't right now.
Gurman flagged the trade-off directly, noting the privacy story might also obscure the fact that part of the back-end security is being handled by Google. That's the same Google that Apple has been quietly losing the AI race to.
For investors, Apple's Services revenue is the cleanest way to track this story. Apple needs Siri to drive App Store time, Apple One bundles, and iCloud upgrades, and a flat chatbot won't move that line.
Whether Apple's privacy pitch is enough to keep iPhone users from opening a third-party chatbot like ChatGPT instead of Siri. The actual AI race may already be over, but the lock-in race - keeping users inside the Apple ecosystem - is just starting.
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