Apple’s AI upgrade has been rumored for a long time, but we got a look Monday at the WWDC developers conference, when the company announced new Apple Intelligence models it built in a partnership with Google, using that company’s Gemini technology.
Apple Intelligence is expected to be built into lots of Apple tools, especially a revamped Siri personal assistant.
“We believe that truly helpful AI must be centered around you and your needs,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, said during the WWDC keynote video presentation.
Read more: How to Watch Apple’s WWDC 2026 Keynote: What to Expect from Siri and iOS 27
Some things about Apple’s AI aren’t really new: The company is leaning particularly heavily toward on-device AI, meaning smaller models built to run on your iPhone, iPad or Mac, rather than in the cloud. It also touted privacy as a cornerstone, noting that Apple doesn’t store your data or chat logs with AI.
What is new? A more powerful on-device model is multi-modal, meaning it can understand speech and images, Federighi said. It is also more accurate with dictation and language understanding. A system orchestrator can coordinate across models, while Apple Intelligence can also work across your apps.
Compared to rivals like Google, Apple has been relatively slow on the AI front. Its models and tools haven’t become household names like ChatGPT, and it hasn’t had viral moments like Anthropic’s Claude Code or Google’s Nano Banana image generator. But the company has been thoughtful about how it integrates generative AI into its products, gradually rolling out new AI-powered features.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
