A multi-year partnership between Apple and Google will see Apple’s Siri voice assistant using Google Gemini’s AI models for its next-generation upgrade. The alliance comes as a surprise, not least because both companies are direct competitors in several key areas.
Furthermore, Apple has long been considered a ‘walled garden’ with their strictly controlled hardware and software ecosystem and lack of interoperability with external tools and platforms. The deal is a significant win for both parties, with Apple gaining access to an industry-leading frontier model and Google’s parent company Alphabet briefly hitting a $4 trillion valuation on the wave of AI optimism following the news.
Currently, Siri is a voice assistant capable of retrieving information and acting on commands. It’s not considered a generative AI (GenAI) app, since it’s unable to handle complex queries and generate new content at scale. As a result, Apple has been left behind in the AI race, and although iOS still enjoyed a market share of 28% in 2025, the company faces increasing pressure to catch up. After all, GenAI is already an integral feature in Google Android (Gemini) and Microsoft Windows (Copilot), while Apple uses Siri. While Apple Intelligence does bring some modern GenAI functionality to iOS and Siri, it is still widely considered far behind frontier models like Gemini or ChatGPT 5.
Until now, Apple has kept AI development in-house. Siri was already lagging behind rivals, like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, years ago. The GenAI race has only heaped further pressure on Apple, which has struggled to build large language models (LLMs) of its own. However, Apple’s unlikely partnership with Google means they’ll be able to leapfrog on AI capabilities, instead of having to start from scratch. For Google, it’s a major strategic victory, since it gives Google’s AI systems access to the largely closed Apple ecosystem, thereby giving them a significant advantage over rivals like Microsoft.
The broader market implications of the move remain to be seen, but it seems likely that the alliance will further accelerate the AI ‘arms race’, where the major players are striving to embed AI assistants everywhere. For smaller software companies, the move highlights the need to carefully navigate an increasingly unpredictable and fast-moving market. Today it might be Apple and Google; tomorrow could see another surprising tie-up. Companies will need to remain as agile as possible by diversifying their integration patterns instead of relying on or even prioritizing one ecosystem.