Apple will pay Google $1 billion a year for access to AI

Apple plans to spend up to $1 billion a year on using Google’s artificial intelligence for an updated version of its Siri voice assistant. According to Bloomberg, it is a super-powerful model with 1.2 trillion parameters, which significantly surpasses Apple’s own solutions in capabilities. The deal is “in the final stages”.

Why Apple needs access to billion-dollar AI

The company has been talking about its intentions to create a “smart Siri” for a long time. Previously, Apple tested products from other developers, including ChatGPT from OpenAI and Claude from Anthropic, but in the end the choice fell on Google.

Google’s special AI system will be a serious step forward compared to Apple’s current models. For example, for the cloud version of Apple Intelligence, the company uses a model with only 150 billion parameters. The innovation should significantly increase performance, improve context understanding and the ability to handle complex tasks.

Internally, the project is called Glenwood. Vision Pro developer Mike Rockwell and software manager Craig Federighi are responsible for its implementation. The release of the updated Siri is expected in the spring of 2026 along with the release of iOS 26.4. The working codename of the assistant is Linwood.

How Siri works with AI

Some Siri functions will continue to work on Apple’s own models, while Google Gemini will focus on analysis, planning and creating aggregated responses, that is, on components that help the assistant understand requests and make decisions. The model will be hosted on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers, which guarantees the isolation of user data from Google’s infrastructure. Apple has already prepared dedicated equipment for these tasks.

According to Mark Gurman, the partnership will not be widely advertised: Apple sees Google more as a behind-the-scenes technology partner, in contrast to the more public agreement regarding Safari, where Google became the default search engine.

Who else pay Google for AI?

Apple is not the only company using Gemini to integrate AI functions. Snap and several other corporations already use the service through Google’s Vertex AI platform. For Apple, the move was an admission of a lag in AI development and a signal of its willingness to rely on external technologies to close the gap.

At the same time, the company emphasizes that Gemini is a temporary solution. In a parallel direction, Apple is developing its own cloud model with a trillion parameters, which is planned to be launched for internal applications as early as next year.