Apple's foray into AI has not been going so well, especially where Siri is concerned. The company has struggled to get the promised "LLM Siri" upgrades off the ground, which has led to significant delays in its release. Now, it sounds like the company may be considering taking drastic steps to get Siri back on track.
According to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, Apple has asked both OpenAI and Anthropic to train custom versions of their own large language models — with the aim of getting them to run on Apple's Private Cloud Computer infrastructure.
While Apple Intelligence does connect with ChatGPT to allow the chatbot to answer questions Siri can't handle, it's always been marketed as a distinct feature. Outsourcing the code to run LLM Siri to another company would be a first for Apple, but it could help the company catch up in the generative AI race — after jumping on that bandwagon rather late.
Gurman claims that Apple's "investigation" into this change is still at an early stage, and it hasn't made a final decision yet. This also means that the in-house version of LLM Siri is still in active development for the time being.
The change, if it happens, is likely to happen sometime next year.
Apple's still trying to catch up
According to reports, Apple didn't anticipate that generative AI would be such a big deal until it was too late. So over the past few years, it's been trying to catch up with the likes of Google, Meta and Open AI in an attempt to get its own AI models up and running.
That hasn't worked out so well, and it means Apple has fallen back on partnering with existing AI companies to get back on track. We've already seen that with the ChatGPT partnership in iOS 18, and utilizing third-party help to create LLM Siri wouldn't be out of the ordinary.
But the more these delays happen, the more Apple falls behind, and deepens its reliance on third parties — something that could prove expensive. Gurman claims this has already proved problematic, and discussions with Anthropic have led the AI startup to push for a "multibillion-dollar annual fee that increases sharply each year." This would not be good for Apple's profit margins.
We're going to have to wait and see how this all plays out, but the one thing we do know is that LLM Siri will not be coming this year. And we had the opportunity to ask Apple about that at WWDC 2025 last month — so be sure to check out the full interview for all the details.
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