According to MacRumors, citing Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman on the TBPN podcast, Apple was initially planning to rebuild its Siri assistant around Anthropic’s Claude AI model. The deal collapsed because Anthropic reportedly wanted “several billion dollars a year” from Apple, with that price doubling annually for three years. Instead, Apple announced a partnership with Google Gemini just a few months ago. The new Siri, powered by Gemini, is expected to debut in iOS 26.4, entering beta in February for a public release in March or April 2025. It will feature personal context awareness and deeper app controls, but will likely require an iPhone 15 Pro or newer. Internally, however, Apple still uses custom versions of Claude on its own servers for product development.
The Money Was The Thing
Here’s the thing: this isn’t just a story about tech specs. It’s a raw look at the brutal economics of the AI arms race. Gurman’s phrasing is telling—Anthropic was holding Apple “over a barrel.” Several billion a year, with insane annual price hikes? That’s a massive, volatile cost for a feature that will be free to users. For Apple, a company obsessed with margin and control, that kind of financial uncertainty was probably a non-starter. Google, with its own existential need to get its AI in front of users, likely offered a more palatable deal, maybe even taking a loss for the strategic win. It shows that even the richest company in the world has its limits when the bill gets too unpredictable.
Claude Is Still The Insider
But the juiciest detail is that Apple still runs on Anthropic internally. They have custom Claude models on their own servers powering internal tools and product development. So, they clearly think Claude’s tech is excellent, maybe even superior for certain tasks. This creates a weird dichotomy. Externally, for the billion-user face of Siri, it’s Google’s engine. Internally, where the actual products are dreamed up? It’s Claude. It makes you wonder if the “best” model lost to the “best” business deal. Is Apple settling for Gemini because it was cheaper, even while its engineers use something else? That’s a fascinating internal tension.
What This Means For Your iPhone
For users, the immediate impact is practical. You’ll need a recent, high-end iPhone (15 Pro or later) to get the new Siri, which continues Apple’s trend of software features driving hardware upgrades. The promised features—understanding your messages, seeing what’s on your screen, actually doing things inside apps—are what we’ve wanted for a decade. But now there’s a new layer of complexity. Your personal assistant will be powered by Google, a company with a very different privacy philosophy than Apple. That’s a huge, quiet shift. Apple will say it’s all private and on-device where possible, but the core intelligence is coming from a third party. That’s a big bet.
The Bigger Platform War
Stepping back, this is a massive coup for Google. Getting Gemini embedded at the heart of iOS is an unparalleled distribution win. For Anthropic, losing the Siri deal is a blow, but being Apple’s behind-the-scenes AI workshop is nothing to sneeze at. It solidifies their reputation as a builder’s AI. And for the industry? It shows that even the most integrated players, like Apple, can’t do it all alone in the AI era. They’re becoming system integrators, picking and choosing foundational models. The real competition isn’t just about building the best AI, but about who can secure the most lucrative, high-profile partnerships. In that game, for now, Google scored a huge point.
