The source also says > The new architecture centers on Apple Foundation Models co-developed with Google, which Apple says are adapted to run both on-device and on servers through its existing Private Cloud Compute infrastructure
Which could mean Google and Apple have trained some custom models, probably the on-device ones, specifically tailored towards Apple's hardware.
Not even Apple has access to it, by design.
And what history?
The real question is why you seem to be so credulous when it comes to this company. Do you extend this trust to other similar companies or is it only reserved for this specific company? I ask this because you're not the first person who seems to consider this company to be almost above criticism even though they've shown to be just like other companies in all respects. When Jobs was still around this stance was supposedly caused by his 'reality distortion field' but he has been gone for a long time and given that Cook has the charisma of an accountant this can no longer be the reason. What makes them so special to some even though their claims have been punctured many times over?
Last year the announced they were working with OpenAI. It looks like this went nowhere, so it's not really surprising to see them try someone else.
Take it with a grain of salt but I don't think it's other AI providers that Apple is upset about. The DMA would require users to be able install any openclaw like thing onto their device with access to everything that Siri can access today. There are all sorts of arguments to be made here but I can understand why Apple feels this way and wants to offer a good experience here.
Apple doesn't care about "offering a good experience". Apple cares about vendor lock in. It pisses off even me, a long-time (18 years and counting) Apple user.
Also is Siri the only thing you’re using in your Apple products that you’re so clueless as to ask “what good experience”? I mean, what kept you in the ecosystem for 18 years and counting?
It wasn't me who said "I can understand why Apple feels this way and wants to offer a good experience here."
> Also is Siri the only thing you’re using in your Apple products that you’re so clueless as to ask “what good experience”? I mean, what kept you in the ecosystem for 18 years and counting?
"How dare you criticize the company whose products you're using"
[1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...
They don't claim that. All they said is "later in the EU as we look into privacy and security" after spending two hours saying how private and secure everything is.
DMA would force them to allow usage from other apps than their own and other assitants than Siri, especially for on-device models.
Edit I stand somewhat corrected but it's regular Apple bullshit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48451012
It didn't work out well for Yahoo.com. It turned out that Google Search was the value and yahoo.com just skin around it. It might be the same for Apple. Gemini is the valuable part, what particular device you use it on matters less.
As i understand it, no LLM is miles ahead of the others right now, especially when it comes to simple agentic stuff. Hell, Qwen3.6-35B-A3 quantized to 3bits running on an 8 year old consumer GPU handles most agentic stuff fine, if a bit slow.
Differences in LLMs boil down to mostly the harness and the compute to run the models. Even for high complexity tasks like coding, the differences between openai, anthropic, google, and the bigger qwen models aren’t that dramatic.
(Ok so $110b is all services revenue not just icloud, but icloud’s a solid chunk of that)
And to your point, Google has a massive balance sheet, produces their own AI chips, and is not going anywhere anytime soon.
Is it really all that difference from Apple defaulting to Google's search engine?
Not really, because the business model isn't there (at least not in this iteration.
1. The models are Apple models, co-developed with Google. They are not white-label Gemini.
2. There's not currently a Google failover or UX
3. Because of that, there's no user monetization to share.
Apple does have a ChatGPT integration, with failover UX, and with a suspected revenue share deal. However, one could see this deal in a precarious situation, since at the time it started it was expected Apple would not focus much at all on a model capable with world knowledge.
Google doesn't care they do not control iOS. Google cares to have their products everywhere. For many years Google apps were better on iOS than on Android, because on Android they just preinstall them while on iOS they need to be installed explicitly.
Android is not a Google product, it is just a tool for Google to collect data. If they manage to collect data via Apple Intelligence they are going to do it. Regardless of what Apple marketing says.
What's the difference now? I would guess 9/10 people here would have a very hard time telling the models apart in a blind taste test.
Well, which ones are on my Mac locally?
Which ones are in my iPhone locally?
The hard part is not distilling a frontier model down into a specific use case when you have hundreds of millions of users, the hard part is (apparently) re-architecting your mobile OS to work with such a model rather than fight it. Those architectural benefits accrue to apple, as will future datasets and expertise, and the benefit of having some distillation working 24/7 on prem.
Anyway, where I think you're going to be grumpy in two years is that switching the underlying model is going to require a jailbreak, and that you wish they'd made the os much more deeply open for agentic interaction, not that it's gemini - it's just not the valuable part of the story for Apple or for users.
Apple was not going to hand over the keys to AI to just anyone.
Apple is a Fortune 5 company with a brand value alone worth more than any of these AI labs besides Google.
There's too much at stake for them to not play it safe. There's almost nothing to gain taking a risk
Yeah, I think Apple's volume made Google the only choice. And even then, Google was buying more DC capacity last week.
They licensed Gemini and Google infrastructure not just for use, but to accelerate the creation of the three independent Apple Foundation Models announced today:
- AFM Core
- AFM Core Advanced
- AFM Cloud
Google also worked to be able to host AFM Cloud on their infrastructure per Apple's private cloud compute architecture, including some form of independent third party review/audit.
I suspect the only two organizations with both the model and the infrastructure needed for Apple were Google and xAI - and I'm not sure Apple would touch Grok with a ten foot pole, even if xAI were willing to let it be used for training.
I don't see the same thing here. Google isn't making any money from being the assistant in Apple, so why would they pay to be it?
I guarantee you Google will start letting people pay to influence the output of the Gemini models once they figure out how to do it.
smart is a weird term, gemma4 is an amazing omni model better than qwen3.6 for non coding tasks (as for all Gemini models). For Apple Intelligence gemma4 makes a lot more sense.
Apple originally partnered with OpenAI. We won’t know all the details for some time, but given OpenAI’s penchant for drama (they started leaking that they might sue Apple [1]), it seems fair to sideline them as a long-term partner.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/14/openai-considering-lega...
The models are quickly converging to similar capabilities with particular ones being better at a particular task until the next release cycle.
> Thinking more cynically, couldn't Google, if they wanted, feed Apple an inferior version of Gemini, ensuring they stay ahead?
Yeah, that's not really how things work at this scale.
Both Apple and Google end up advantaged by this relationship: Apple gets the same technology as Android, meaning there is no competitive front opening up. Google gets eyeballs on almost the entire smartphone market.
Apple can continue to differentiate the iPhone from Android in all the ways that they were doing before.
How exactly are they disadvantaging themselves? Perhaps expand on that opinion a bit, and the data/assumptions you're making in forming it.
My naive assumption is that they're going to do what everyone is doing: make tooling that lets you swap in any model.
I don't think it's fair to assume incompetence, on their part. I think it's much safer to assume they're doing what's best for them, and it's very clear to them what's best (money, support, etc).
They are a ways away from that for Siri, as they can't guarantee third party tooling meets their security and privacy requirements. Meeting those security and privacy requirements also makes it harder for a third party to monetize their investment or ongoing use of infrastructure.
But I suspect you will see integration in other areas, such as image generation.
Also openai and Jonny Ive (love from) are cooking some device — may be personal
Anthropic doesn't have the spare compute laying around to do this deal. Even they're buying compute from Google.
OpenAI/Anthropic have nothing in this segment.
Also important to remember how immature OpenAI and Anthropic are as companies. It would be a huge technical, legal, and reputational risk to commit to using them.
Just having an ungodly amount of capex by blanketing the Midwest with datacenters full of GPUs is a disaster in slow motion.
Why are Apple people like this lmao. Yeah ofc they could, but they won't because 2 businesses as large as them have a deal it's usually honored.
Couldn't anybody in Apple's supply chain sabotage them? Contrary to popular belief, I don't think Google is in direct competition with Apple at all...Google don't make a mobile operating system. And they certainly don't make much hardware (especially that people should buy).
Realistically, does it matter? Most people aren't going to switch phone ecosystems over the assistant available on their phone's OS.
You can even see difference in agent harnesses using the same model in the same company if you compare Gemini CLI with AntiGrav. They are different experiences.
I’m pretty sure Apple’s agent harness will be drastically different from Google’s even with the same model