Apple-Google AI deal raises questions over ChatGPT partnership, stokes competition-related concerns

Apple and Google have announced a multiyear AI partnership that will see Google’s Gemini technology power the next generation of Siri on devices like the iPhone. The deal, expected to be worth around $1 billion annually, marks a significant shift in Apple’s AI strategy, and could also raise questions over the company’s partnership with ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

The Google partnership represents a more fundamental integration, with Gemini serving as the foundation for Apple’s broader AI strategy rather than just handling overflow queries.

“Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google’s Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalised Siri coming this year,” the two companies said in a joint statement Monday.

The two companies have a history of working together, most notably, the over $20 billion that Google has paid Apple to keep its search engine the default on iPhones. And with its Gemini 3 update, the software giant was largely seen to have taken a lead over key rival ChatGPT, which had an early lead in the generative AI race.

The fresh deal has, however, raised some competition-related concerns. “This seems like an unreasonable concentration of power for Google, given that (they) also have Android and Chrome,” Elon Musk said in a post on social media platform X. Musk has his own AI firm xAI, which competes with other major AI companies in the industry by building foundational models and spending billions on massive infrastructure.

The partnership will see Apple pay about $1 billion a year for a 1.2-trillion parameter artificial intelligence model developed by Alphabet Inc.’s Google to run its overhauled Siri voice assistant. The collaboration extends beyond just Siri. According to a joint statement, the next generation of Apple foundation models will be based on Google’s Gemini models and cloud technology. Apple confirmed it chose Google’s technology after careful evaluation, determining it provides the most capable foundation for its AI ambitions.

While the two companies have not made specifics of the agreement public, it is anticipated that Google will license the base technology of Gemini to Apple, with the iPhone maker making tweaks to it to work across its ecosystem. AI models like Gemini have two stages, one is called a pretrained model, where it is trained to generate a string of words together, and then comes the post training phase, where the model is offered a distinct personality. Google would most likely offer the pretrained version of Gemini to Apple.

To address any privacy concerns arising out of the deal, the companies have also said that Apple Intelligence (the company’s branding for its AI offerings) will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute (PCC), while maintaining Apple’s privacy standards. The company says its personal cloud ensures that personal user data sent to the PCC isn’t accessible to anyone other than the user.

The next-generation Siri is expected to arrive with iOS 26.4, likely releasing to the public in March or April 2026. Google’s stock briefly touched above a $4 trillion market valuation following the announcement.

Apple has largely stood on the sidelines of the AI revolution that swept Wall Street following ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022. While competitors like Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft invested billions in AI infrastructure and products, Apple struggled to deliver on its AI promises.

The company had announced a significant Siri upgrade during its WWDC 2024 keynote but was forced to delay the features. Apple acknowledged it would take longer than anticipated to deliver these capabilities, pushing the rollout from 2025 to 2026.

Google’s 1.2 trillion parameter model is significantly larger and more powerful than Apple’s own AI model, meaning the revamped Siri should be far more capable than what Apple could have developed independently in the same timeframe.