Hey Siri, Call Google – David Demaree
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Monday’s WWDC 2026 keynote — Tim Cook’s final Apple event as CEO, with incoming CEO John Ternus presumably debuting at the iPhone launch this fall — was nearly all about Apple Intelligence. I joked on Bluesky that the only difference between this year’s keynote and the infamous 2024 edition, where Apple announced a slew of AI features that were nowhere near ready and never shipped, is that this time, Apple either had live demos to show or had gotten a lot better at faking things.
I think it’s the former, FWIW. Unlike 2024, when Apple was trying to build its own foundation models and infrastructure from scratch in less than a year, they’ve partnered with Google for both the core models (based on Gemini, but customized and rebranded for Apple) and the underlying cloud compute. The "private cloud compute" is still relatively unproven (because no one else has tried it), but Apple’s original papers and statements about it hold up, and we know that the underlying AI tech works because the Gemini app works.
The biggest open questions are around local, on-device models, since locally hosted models like Google’s open-source Gemma family (likely the basis of the local Siri models) are magical but nowhere near as powerful as enormous cloud-based ones like Gemini 3, GPT-5, or Claude 5.
This matters because a lot of Apple’s demos showed the AI performing near-flawlessly with lots of disparate experiences and data. If the OS is asking the local (or, for that matter, cloud) models lots of quick, targeted questions, this might be how it goes in real life. If they’re trying to one-shot things, Siri AI might call your boss when you want directions to the liquor store.
This is basically all I have to say about Apple Intelligence and Siri AI from a technical standpoint. There’s probably a lot of interesting detail in the deeper WWDC session content, and I think the real story may turn out to be how Apple exposes these capabilities to developers, rather than how Siri is now a friendlier, more pervasive Microsoft Copilot.
What Apple showed is an iOS experience with all rough edges and friction removed thanks to magical AI — cool if true, but also nothing new. Third-party devs, armed with on-device AI and Apple SDKs, are well-positioned to make something new.
Google was WWDC’s biggest winner
Obviously, because Apple is using Google’s closed-source AI models and hosting at least some of the "private cloud compute" on GCP, this is potentially as big a revenue generator for Google as the long-running deal to make Google Search the default in Safari. It’s not accurate to say "Siri AI runs on Gemini," but for Google’s purposes it may as well be the same thing.
But to whatever extent Apple Intelligence will rely on local, on-device models, Apple’s announcements are also good for Google in that they’re bad for OpenAI and Anthropic. Two reasons:
OpenAI and Anthropic’s businesses depend on cloud-hosted models
To oversimplify, 100% of Anthropic’s revenue comes from individuals and businesses sending prompts and data to a Claude API endpoint (either from a first-party app/harness or via a third party like Lovable), for which Anthropic charges a subscription fee or for token usage. The more useful AI stuff can be done without cloud compute, the less demand there is for the big labs’ APIs.
The insane trillion-dollar valuations for these companies, plus SpaceX’s IPO prospectus claiming "the largest actionable total addressable market in human history" — a $28.5 trillion figure roughly the size of the entire US economy, most of it attributed to AI — assume that some huge percentage of all global information will flow through their systems, allowing them to charge rent on almost all human activity. Even in a world where AI APIs would remain the dominant way we work with models, that would be a crazy-pants idea and not a sound investment thesis. AI is not likely to get good at cleaning toilets, and a human janitor is certainly cheaper than what Anthropic would charge per token.
If even a third of the potential AI use cases were handled locally on our devices, that could drastically change the future market these labs/startups will compete in. And while they could still be gigantic companies, it would make more sense to value them like any other platform or infra company, not like whole economies.
Google is the only halfway successful, diversified AI company
Google doesn’t need AI to be a trillion-dollar company. For Google, there’s more risk in OpenAI and Anthropic disrupting their search business than upside in mastering AI. That said, Google Search’s near-universal distribution means that — absent ChatGPT becoming the new way everyone around the world gets questions answered — Google’s AI search is likely to run the table for the foreseeable future. (Even though at present you can’t start a query with a verb.)
Google also has other businesses (though none as big as Search/Ads),...