For years, Apple and Google have had a… are-they-aren’t-they The type of relationship that will matter as far as which AI company Apple chooses to power its Siri virtual assistant and give it new AI-fueled personalization and agentic capabilities. Apple has spent the last year or two playing the field, Allegedly Am considering working with OpenAI or Anthropic to support the new Siri. But worthy of announcing a multi-year partnership the Bachelor-In final style, Apple announced that it will always be happy with Google – that the company’s Gemini AI models will underpin a more personalized version of Apple’s Siri coming sometime in 2026.
“After careful evaluation, Apple determined that Google’s Al technology provides the most capable foundation for the Apple Foundation model and is excited about the exciting new experiences it will unlock for Apple users,” Google and Apple wrote in a statement. joint statement.
The companies said the deal allows Apple to use both Gemini AI and Google’s cloud technology to power its future Frontier models and Apple Intelligence features, adding that Apple Intelligence “will continue to run on Apple devices and private cloud compute while maintaining Apple’s industry-leading privacy standards.”
The latter point was highlighted by analysts at Morningstar, who wrote in a note on Monday that the agreement would help “maintain” Apple’s reputation for security and privacy, as it will use Gemini instances on its own servers in its own data centers for AI processing through its private cloud compute offering. The analysts said they “expect users to be able to choose to share signals directly with Gemini.”
But what does this deal actually mean for both companies? It is not yet clear how the exchange of technology will work. Is Google white-labeling its AI models and making them available to Apple through Apple’s own AI team, or is Google going to work hand-in-hand with Apple to ensure a successful end product in the new Siri? We will see. But the fact that the companies’ joint statement emphasized “private cloud computing” means that, at the very least, Apple’s new deal with Google will be similar to its deal with OpenAI in Siri from a privacy perspective. William Kerwin, senior equity analyst at Morningstar, noted that Apple would likely ask users for their permission before sharing anything directly with Google. The Verge.
On the surface, Apple and Google may appear to be rival tech giants, but the two companies have had a close, complex relationship for more than a decade. Specifically, the two are linked to a mysterious longtime deal in which Apple products featured Google as the default search engine on its devices, which it was at one point responsible for. about half of Google’s search traffic. Former Apple General Counsel Bruce Sewell described the idea of ”collaboration”. the new York Times, Saying“You have brutal competition, but at the same time, you also have essential collaboration.”
Google paid Apple up to $20 billion per year Through Apple’s Safari browser, to maintain its position as the default search engine on Apple devices. After a protracted antitrust lawsuit, a federal district court judge ruled last fall that Google can continue making such payments. The decision on that measure paved the way for Monday’s announcement — and the “cooperation” involved means both companies will benefit significantly, even if Rumor In many ways the $1 billion per year payment from Apple to Google is negligible in such a high-value industry.
The comparatively low annual payout helps illustrate how mutually beneficial the partnership is: a win-win for the two FAANG companies, helping each other strengthen the ramparts against high-flying AI startups that could upset their long-term profits.
“From Apple’s perspective, it’s certainly a win if you think about the trouble they’ve had with their AI strategy so far,” said Morningstar’s Kerwin. “The long and the short of it is that they promised too much in the summer of 2024, and yet, they still haven’t delivered on what they promised.” He said the multiyear agreement means Apple can stop investing in building a reputation as a frontier model company and instead focus on user experience with a separate company’s AI foundation, as well as eventually, potentially, become a major player in AI agent providers’ battle for consumer attention — which requires AI agents that are in theory so useful that they enter the consumer market in a new and unprecedented way.
On Google’s side, Kerwin said, “This win is similar to their quest to become a real choice, in the consumer’s mind, as an AI model … This will get them a ton more users from the iPhone user base and really strengthen that brand’s image as a go-to AI model that supports all these features.”
Still, experts say, the deal could draw the same scrutiny that Google just struck a deal with.
James Grimmelman, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School, said, “I think it was possible that the Google antitrust trial could have stopped Google from making deals like this in the first place – (it’s) certainly a potential remedy that could have been on the table and not been adopted by the judge.” The Verge. Part of the government’s case in the Search trial was precisely aimed at preventing Google from making similar sweetheart AI deals, though Google had largely gotten its way on that front.
“That doesn’t mean the deal won’t raise antitrust concerns, and it’s possible that a few years from now Google could face a new antitrust investigation for being an AI provider for Apple in the same way it faced antitrust scrutiny for being a search provider,” Grimmelman said. “If you think about the time when Google started appearing as a default search provider and these placement deals started, that was a less concentrated search market. So it may be that the market may evolve in a way that this kind of deal will become more problematic over time.”
The details of the arrangement between Apple and Google aren’t exactly clear yet, and those details matter from both antitrust and AI business perspectives, said Blake Reed, associate professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School.
“The main concern about the Apple-Google search deal was that Apple sending such a large volume of queries to Google would make it difficult for Google to create a competitive search engine for anyone else,” Reed said. “But is Apple going to send data in a similar way here? Apple’s early statements indicate that they will use Google’s technology as a white-label technology stack, which they will adapt and deploy as an Apple service. If Google is only getting money from Apple, that makes the antitrust problem less obvious.”
The announcement also comes after Apple’s well-publicized trials and tribulations attempting to upgrade Siri’s AI capabilities to accomplish more personalization and agentic tasks. At the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference last June, mention of Siri was conspicuously absent, other than the announcement that previously promised updates were running behind schedule.
“We’re continuing our work to deliver features that make Siri even more personal,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of software engineering, said during the June event. “This work requires more time to reach our high quality level, and we look forward to sharing more about it in the coming year.”
That time, obviously, is now. It’s been a semi-embarrassing year for Apple’s AI strategy: A summary of the Apple Intelligence messages that were far from the targetTV ads for new Siri features that ran last year (though those features still haven’t arrived), and Allegedly Longtime AI chief John Giannandrea was replaced by Mike Rockwell, who previously led Apple’s Vision Pro. So the company is changing things up with a set of new high-profile Google partnerships and upcoming AI integrations with other startups.
Cornell’s Grimmelman said, “Apple is worried that the rise of AI threatens to obliterate it altogether – that it had a unique relationship with users because of its devices and its hardware-software integration, and AI threatens to erode that relationship in the same way that the browser rise of the Web has deeply threatened Microsoft’s relationship with its users.” “Apple first attempted to develop its own AI models and then partnered with Google here – this is its attempt to continue to be in that relationship and remain relevant.”
