Apple To Pay Google About $1 Billion A Year To Make Siri Smarter

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Apple plans to use a specialized version of Google’s Gemini AI model to power Apple Intelligence platform features. The company will pay Google approximately $1 billion annually for access to this technology, which will generate text summaries and perform planning-related tasks.

According to Bloomberg analyst Mark Gurman, the two companies have now finalized the terms of their collaboration and are preparing an agreement that will allow Apple to use Google technology. This will significantly simplify Siri’s analysis of complex queries and the understanding of accumulated data. A summer 2025 announcement already indicated that Apple had considered various third-party AI models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, but following testing, Google’s Gemini solution was selected. Gemini is expected to be used temporarily until Apple develops its own sufficiently powerful models.

Google Gemini has approximately 1.2 trillion parameters, nearly ten times the parameters of the cloud-based version of Apple’s Intelligence AI platform, which operates on 150 billion parameters. The adaptation of this third-party AI model, known internally as Glenwood, is being led by Mike Rockwell, who developed the Vision Pro mixed reality headset, along with Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software. The updated voice assistant is scheduled for next spring as part of the iOS 26.4 release and is codenamed Linwood.

Under the agreement between Apple and Google, the Gemini model will perform summarization (creating short descriptions of notifications, web pages, text, etc.) and scheduling (determining how to execute commands) functions for Siri. However, some capabilities will remain reserved for Apple’s own AI models. The new technology will run on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers, ensuring user data is protected from Google’s infrastructure. The server hardware required to support this system is already in place in Cupertino.

Last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook told investors that an updated version of Siri would arrive next spring, and did not rule out further integrations with third-party AI developers.