Apple cracks open siri’s walled garden to let rival ais fight for your voice
Apple plans to tear
down the last wall around Siri, allowing any ai assistant—Gemini, Claude, the next start-up with a clever model—to answer iPhone owners through the same voice trigger that once only summoned Apple’s own bot. The shift, baked into iOS 27 this autumn, turns every iPhone into a gladiator arena where ChatGPT, Google and Anthropic duel for the user’s next query while Apple quietly collects a gate fee.Gate-keeper becomes toll-booth operator
The mechanics are simple. Install Gemini from the App Store, toggle it inside the refreshed Siri settings, and saying “Hey Siri” will route the question to Google’s servers if Siri judges the prompt better suited to its rival. The same tap-to-switch menu will surface Claude, Perplexity, Baidu’s Ernie or any future partner that agrees to share subscription revenue. Apple already pockets 15–30 % of the $19,99 ChatGPT Plus upsell pushed since iOS 18; the company now wants the same cut from every ai subscription sold on its hardware.
Engineering teams in Cupertino are rebuilding Siri’s front end so the assistant behaves like a universal remote rather than a single channel. A new “Ask Siri” button appears in Control Centre; Spotlight search merges with chat history; and a grey-text disclaimer—“Answering via Claude”—appears on-screen so users know whose cloud is listening. The goal is to keep traffic inside Apple’s ecosystem while the intellectual heavy lifting happens elsewhere.
Why surrender control now?
Because Siri, launched in 2011, became the smartest guest who never learned new tricks. Internal metrics seen by TechBloom show that fewer than 3 % of eligible iPhone owners invoke Siri for tasks beyond timers or weather, while ChatGPT’s mobile app raced past 200 million downloads in 18 months. Wall Street analysts trimmed Apple’s price target last winter after the company admitted it was “investing more than $1 billion annually” to catch up in generative ai yet had no consumer product to show. Letting rivals onto the stage is cheaper—and faster—than inventing a better actor.
China complicates the script. Tim Cook’s recent Beijing tour doubled as a lobbying mission to persuade regulators that letting local models like Ernie or Moonshot ai plug into Siri does not violate cybersecurity rules mandating data stay on Chinese servers. Sources close to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology say provisional approval is likely, provided Apple promotes domestic ai first in the Siri carousel. Expect the China build of iOS 27 to list Gemini and Claude under a collapsible “international services” tab.
The revenue model hiding in plain sight
Every routed query feeds Apple’s ledger. If a user who arrives via Siri subscribes to Gemini Advanced, Google must share the $20 monthly fee just as it already does for YouTube Premium sold inside the App Store. Multiply that by the 135 million iPhone upgrades expected this cycle and the commission could add $800 million in high-margin services revenue next year, according to Morgan Stanley estimates. Apple risks cannibalising its own AI spend, but services chief Eddy Cue argues that a 30 % slice of a booming market beats 100 % of a shrinking one.
Developers smell opportunity. Anthropic has already submitted a SiriKit extension that lets users upload PDFs and ask Claude to summarise them aloud; Perplexity is testing a live web citation read-out when iPhone cameras scan documents. The first wave of integrations will arrive alongside iOS 27 beta 3 in July, with Apple curating entries the same way it vets Apple Watch faces—subjective, opaque and profitable.
Consumers get frictionless choice, but at the cost of deeper lock-in. Queries remain tied to Apple IDs, purchase histories and on-device biometric data. Siri may outsource the brain, yet the nervous system still belongs to Cupertino. The company that once promised “what happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone” now peddles a more nuanced pledge: what happens on your iPhone earns Apple a commission, no matter whose servers do the thinking.
Apple will trumpet the change as user empowerment. The numbers tell a simpler story: when you can’t win the game, franchise the stadium—and charge rent for every ticket.