The walled garden that always kept everything behind its own walls opened a gate - and let a foreign brain move in.
Apple sells a walled garden. The iPhone talks to the Mac, the Mac talks to Apple Music - everything runs through the App Store, the app marketplace Apple controls entirely. For decades that closedness was their strength: nothing breaks, everything is smooth, because Apple holds every door. Except AI doesn't grow behind closed doors. It grows out of vast amounts of data and computing power that even Apple doesn't stockpile on its own.
Siri, Apple's voice assistant, is the symbol of the delay. The company's own internal tests showed it fails on around 33% of more complex requests. Apple Intelligence, the bundle of AI features announced in 2024, was delayed repeatedly - the company's own models simply weren't good enough.
So Apple did something out of character for it: it let a foreign player into the garden. In January 2026 it announced a partnership with Google, the company behind the search engine and the Gemini model, to power the new Siri. Before that, Apple had also talked with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and with Anthropic, the company behind Claude. It pays Google roughly one billion dollars a year for the right to use a version of Gemini built specifically to its own spec.
Apple's own models, called AFM, continue to exist in parallel, but they stay small - built to run directly on the device, not to compete with the strongest models on the market. The deal with Google was announced as non-exclusive, meaning Apple keeps a door open to add other providers later on.