Apple rented Siri's brain from the world's biggest ad company

Siri is finally going to be good. For about fifteen years it has been the thing you use to set a timer and not much else. Now it will hold a proper conversation and actually do what you ask the first time. The part Apple is quieter about is why. The brains behind the new Siri are not Apple’s, they are Google’s. Apple is paying Google something like a billion dollars a year to run Gemini behind Siri, and for a company that sells privacy as the main selling point, that is an odd cheque to be writing.

The deal was confirmed in January. Apple picked Gemini to power the next Siri, and both sides described Google’s models as “the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models.” Some analysts reckon the contract could be worth up to five billion dollars over its life. Bloomberg reported the new Siri could arrive as early as February. So the better Siri is real and close. The engine inside it just happens to be Google’s.

Apple paid users a settlement for Siri listening to them, then handed Siri to the company whose whole business is listening to people.

The timing is the awkward part. In the same month the Gemini news came out, Apple started paying out a 95 million dollar settlement over Siri eavesdropping. The case, brought by a man named Lopez, claimed Siri picked up private conversations, and that bits of them reached third parties who used them to target ads. Apple denied all of it and said it never sold Siri data. It settled anyway, in its own words, “to avoid additional litigation.” If you owned a Siri device between 2014 and the end of 2024, you could put in a claim for up to twenty dollars a device. The money started landing in accounts on the 23rd of January. So within a few weeks, Apple was paying people because Siri listened too much, and signing a deal to send the next Siri through Google.

Now the practical question. Apple’s whole pitch is that what happens on your phone stays on your phone. That only really works if the phone is the thing doing the thinking. Once the harder questions get passed to Gemini, the privacy promise rests on a contract with the biggest advertising company in the world. Apple says the Gemini models will run on its own private servers, sealed off, with nothing going back to Google. That may well be true. But you have moved from trusting the hardware to trusting the paperwork, and paperwork is the sort of thing the Lopez case was about in the first place.

To be fair to Apple, the honest reason is probably just that they fell behind. Building a model this good is hard, Apple was years late to it, and renting Gemini is the quickest way to ship a Siri that does not embarrass them on stage. As a business call, that is reasonable enough. It only turns into a problem because Apple will keep selling the result as a privacy product.

So if part of why you stayed inside Apple’s world was that you did not want Google near your data, this is worth a quiet think. The assistant on your lock screen is slowly becoming a Google product with an Apple login. Maybe that bothers you, maybe it does not. Either way, there is not much point paying extra for a promise that now runs through Mountain View.

If you want the original reporting, CNBC broke the Gemini deal here, and CBS has the settlement details here. Read them one after the other. Together they say a bit more than either one does on its own.