is The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.
For years, Apple and Google have had a will-they-won’t-they type of relationship, as far as which AI company Apple would pick to underpin 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, reportedly considering working with OpenAI or Anthropic to support the new Siri. But in a multiyear partnership announcement worthy of a The Bachelor-style finale, Apple announced that it would live happily ever after 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 Apple Foundation Models and is excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for Apple users,” Google and Apple wrote in a joint statement.
The deal allows Apple to use both Gemini AI and Google’s cloud technology to power its future frontier models and Apple Intelligence features, the companies said, 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 will help Apple’s reputation for security and privacy “remain intact, as it will use Gemini instances on its own servers in its own data centers via its Private Cloud Compute offering for AI processing.” The analysts added that they “expect users will be able to opt in to sharing prompts with Gemini directly, as well.”
But what does this deal actually mean for both companies? It’s not clear yet exactly how the exchange of technology will work. Is Google providing its AI models for Apple to white-label and build upon via 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’ll see. But the fact that the company’s joint statement emphasized the “private cloud compute” of it all means that at the very least, Apple’s new deal with Google will be similar from a privacy standpoint to its deal with OpenAI in Siri. Apple will likely prompt a user for their permission before sharing anything directly with Google, William Kerwin, senior equity analyst at Morningstar, told The Verge.
On the surface, Apple and Google might appear to be rival tech giants, but the two companies have had a close, complex relationship for more than a decade. In particular, the two are connected by a mysterious longtime deal that involved Apple products featuring Google as the default search engine on its devices, which at one point was responsible for almost half of Google’s search traffic. Bruce Sewell, Apple’s former general counsel, described the idea of “co-opetition” to The New York Times, saying, “You have brutal competition, but at the same time, you have necessary cooperation.”
Google paid Apple up to $20 billion per year to maintain its position as the default search engine on Apple devices, via Apple’s Safari browser. After a drawn-out antitrust lawsuit, a federal district court judge ruled last fall that Google could continue making such payments. That remedy ruling paved the way for Monday’s announcement — and the “co-opetition” involved means both companies stand to benefit significantly, even though the rumored $1 billion-per-year payment from Apple to Google is in many ways negligible in such a high-value industry.
The comparatively low annual payment helps illustrate how mutually beneficial the partnership is: a win-win for two FAANG companies helping each other bolster the ramparts against the high-flying AI startups that could upset their longtime advantage.
“From Apple’s perspective, it’s certainly a win if you think about the pain that they’ve had in their AI strategy up to this point,” Morningstar’s Kerwin said. “The long and short of it is that they over-promised back in the summer of 2024, and they under-delivered, still, now, what they promised.” He added that the multiyear agreement means that Apple can stop investing in building up a reputation as a frontier model company and focus instead on user experience with a different company’s AI foundation, as well as finally, potentially, becoming a key player in the AI agent providers’ battle for consumer attention — which requires AI agents that are, in theory, so useful that they break into the consumer market in a new and unprecedented way.
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