Report: Apple does about-face on Siri chatbot — and it might compete directly with ChatGPT and Google

Apple promised us this was never the plan...until we guess, it became the plan: A new report from Apple soothsayer Mark Gurman says Apple will build an all-new Siri chatbot for iOS 27, one that looks and works differently but should remind most of us of an AI chatbot like ChatGPT.

To say this is a possible about-face is an understnatment and it's just one piece of the whirlwind that is apparently now Siri development.

Remember that pledge to deliver in early 2026 the Apple Intelligence Siri we were promised almost two years ago? That's apparently still happening, Gurman claims, via an iOS 26.4 update. If so, Siri will, with your permission, be able to see your screen, understand your actions in apps and other systems, becoming a more proactive and smarter assistant.

It's unclear if that ability is still what Apple meant when it announced earlier this month that it would use Google Gemini models to build its Foundation Models and enable the promised Siri. The only reason to doubt that iOS 26.4 will contain that is the timeline.

For Apple to deliver that update by late May (before it unveils iOS 27 in June), it probably must have been working with Google since late last year. Again, Apple is not commenting, so we have no insight into the development process.

Siri, we have questions

What will power this potential Siri AI chatbot is also a question mark. Will it still be tapping into Gemini foundation models and therefore be more or less a skin for Gemini? That seems unlikely, or at least too much of an admission by Apple that it was never up to the task.

But Gurman claims that not only will the iOS 26.4 update use those promised Gemini models (albeit built into Apple's Foundation Models), but the chatbot update (currently called Project Campos, per Gurman) will also rely in part on fresher, more powerful Gemini models and even use Google cloud servers.

That last bit sounds bonkers because it erases the security promise of Apple's Private Compute Cloud. Sure, since iOS 18, it's transparently sent some queries to either ChatGPT or Google, but to send potentially all Siri Chatbot prompts there is tantamount to abandoning a core privacy promise.

The problem with this Gurman theory is that it contradicts what Federighi told me almost a year ago at WWDC 2025 when we asked about what happened to the development of that long-promised Siri update.

"This wasn't about just building a chatbot," said Federighi last year, adding. "...That was never the goal, and it remains not our primary goal."

A hint of truth

So who are we to believe? Gurman or Apple executives. To be fair to Gurman, the only recent comment we have from Apple is that they are partnering with Google (Gurman claims it's for a $1 billion-a-year price tag, paid to Google). So it stands to reason that there is some truth here.

I agree with Apple that Google's Gemini provides some of the best models, and it is clear that Apple can't get there on its own, but the handing of privacy keys to a chief computer, one who already rules so much of our data, looks pretty anti-Apple. That's why I'll take all these rumors with a massive helping of salt and await Apple's next big AI reveal.

---

---

Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!

And of course, you can also follow TechRadar on YouTube and TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp too.

---