Key Takeaways
- Reports suggest Apple is considering licensing large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI or Anthropic to power a future version of Siri, a profound shift from its traditional in-house development strategy.
- The move signals an acknowledgement that Siri has fallen significantly behind competitors in conversational AI, making a third-party partnership the fastest path back to relevance.
- This potential pivot creates a fundamental conflict between Apple’s core tenets of privacy and ecosystem control, and the market necessity of having a competitive AI assistant.
- The choice of partner is not trivial; OpenAI offers market-leading performance, while Anthropic’s focus on AI safety could offer better brand alignment with Apple’s privacy-centric messaging.
- The ultimate strategy may be a hybrid model, using third-party LLMs for off-device general intelligence while retaining on-device processing for sensitive tasks and maintaining control over the user interface.
Apple appears to be contemplating a strategic concession of monumental significance, with reports indicating it is evaluating partnerships with OpenAI or Anthropic to supply the core intelligence for its voice assistant, Siri.1 This represents more than a simple software update; it is a potential abdication of a key technological battleground and a direct challenge to the company’s long-standing philosophy of vertical integration. For years, Apple has championed the virtues of its ‘walled garden,’ where hardware, software, and services are developed in unison to protect user privacy and deliver a seamless experience. Outsourcing Siri’s ‘brain’ would be the most significant deviation from that doctrine in recent memory, suggesting the internal deficit in generative AI is too vast to bridge in the short term.
The Problem with Siri
To understand the gravity of this potential shift, one must first acknowledge Siri’s stagnation. Launched as a pioneer in 2011, the assistant has since become a case study in arrested development. While competitors like Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa evolved with increasingly sophisticated natural language understanding, Siri has remained frustratingly rigid, often defaulting to web searches for all but the simplest commands. This performance gap has transformed from a minor annoyance into a strategic vulnerability as generative AI becomes central to the user interface of the future.
Apple’s own efforts to develop a competing large language model, reportedly codenamed ‘Apple GPT,’ have seemingly not progressed quickly enough to meet the competitive threat.2 The sheer computational and data-centric challenge of training frontier models has favoured specialists like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. For Apple, whose primary expertise lies in hardware and tightly integrated software ecosystems, the ‘make or buy’ decision for foundational AI has become increasingly acute. Continuing on the current path risks ceding the next generation of user interaction to rivals, making a partnership—however philosophically unpalatable—a pragmatic necessity.
A Devil’s Bargain: Choosing a Partner
The choice is not merely about picking the best technology; it is about choosing the least damaging compromise. A partnership with either OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, or Anthropic, backed by Google and Amazon, involves inviting a competitor deep inside the fortress. Each option presents a distinct set of trade-offs.
OpenAI’s GPT models are the current market leaders in raw capability, offering a fast track to state-of-the-art performance. However, OpenAI’s aggressive, growth-focused culture and its complex relationship with Microsoft present potential clashes with Apple’s methodical and secretive approach. Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI researchers, has positioned itself as the safety-conscious alternative. Its focus on creating ‘constitutional AI’ aligns more neatly with Apple’s public commitment to privacy and ethical technology, potentially making it a more palatable partner despite its models being perceived as slightly behind OpenAI’s in some benchmarks.3
| Factor | In-House Model | OpenAI Partnership | Anthropic Partnership |
|---|---|---|---|
| Performance | Currently lagging; significant investment required to catch up. | Market-leading capabilities; immediate performance uplift. | Strong performance with an emphasis on reliability and safety. |
| Brand & Privacy | Maximum control; fully aligned with Apple’s privacy-first brand. | Potential brand dilution; data privacy concerns need careful navigation. | Stronger brand alignment due to focus on AI safety and ethics. |
| Cost & Control | High internal R&D and infrastructure costs but full control. | Potentially enormous licensing fees; dependence on a third party. | Likely significant licensing fees; reliance on an external roadmap. |
| Time to Market | Slowest path to a competitive next-generation Siri. | Fastest path to deploying a state-of-the-art AI assistant. | Rapid deployment, potentially with easier integration on safety grounds. |
The Hybrid Hypothesis
It is improbable that Apple would simply cede total control over Siri. A more plausible outcome is the development of a sophisticated hybrid architecture. In this model, Apple would continue to develop its own smaller, efficient on-device models to handle sensitive requests, such as accessing personal data like calendars, messages, and contacts. These on-device tasks would remain within Apple’s secure enclave, preserving its privacy promises.
For more complex, general-knowledge queries that require vast world knowledge, requests could be routed—with user consent—to a third-party LLM from a partner like OpenAI or Anthropic. This would allow Apple to offer best-in-class conversational ability without compromising its core privacy principles for personal data. The engineering challenge would be to make the hand-off between the on-device and cloud-based models seamless, preventing a disjointed user experience. If successful, this approach could offer the best of both worlds: the power of a frontier LLM and the privacy of Apple’s ecosystem.
This rumoured deliberation is a critical inflection point. It is a tacit admission that in the age of generative AI, even the world’s most valuable company may not be able to build everything itself. For investors and technologists, the final decision will not just redefine Siri; it will offer a clear signal about Apple’s strategy for the next decade of computing and whether its famous walled garden is about to get a new gate.
References
- Gurman, M., & Bass, D. (2024, June 30). Apple Weighs Using Anthropic or OpenAI to Power Siri in Major Reversal. Bloomberg. Retrieved from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-30/apple-weighs-replacing-siri-s-ai-llms-with-anthropic-claude-or-openai-chatgpt
- Gurman, M. (2023, July 19). Apple Is Secretly Working on ‘Apple GPT,’ Its Own Generative AI Tool. Bloomberg. Retrieved from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-19/apple-is-secretly-working-on-ai-tools-to-challenge-openai-and-google
- Anthropic. (n.d.). Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback. Retrieved from https://www.anthropic.com/news/constitutional-ai-harmlessness-from-ai-feedback
