Apple may have kicked off the virtual assistant game with Siri, but let’s be real—Siri’s been falling behind for years. And now, it looks like even Apple knows it. After struggling to build a solid in-house AI model, the company is reportedly getting ready to bring in the big names: OpenAI and Anthropic.
According to reports, Apple has been quietly testing its own Foundation Models—the tech meant to power Siri’s big AI glow-up. But after months of internal comparisons with ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Gemini, it seems Apple’s version just couldn’t keep up.
The original plan? Launch Siri's AI-powered upgrade with the Apple Intelligence rollout. But even the iPhone 16 Pro Max couldn’t run Apple’s models properly, leading the company to delay the project twice—with a new timeline pushed to 2026.
Inside the company, things weren’t looking great either. Morale reportedly took a hit, and top AI engineers started jumping ship, lured by mega offers from Meta and OpenAI. With Apple Intelligence features not exactly sparking an iPhone upgrade wave, leadership made a bold move: replaced the AI team head and ordered a full performance review.
The result? Apple’s internal models weren’t cutting it. Anthropic’s Claude LLM reportedly outperformed Apple’s own tech, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT coming in close behind.
That brings us to now. Apple is actively in talks with both Anthropic and OpenAI to bring their models into Siri. If the deal goes through, future versions of Siri could be powered by either Claude or ChatGPT, depending on how the talks play out.
Of course, with Apple, it’s never just about performance. Privacy is key. Apple reportedly wants to run these models on its own Private Cloud Compute servers. It’s also asking both companies to customise their LLMs, so Apple can stay in control of privacy settings and keep everything in line with its user-first philosophy.
So while Apple may not have built the AI brain it hoped for, it’s now playing it smart by teaming up with companies that have. And if Siri finally becomes more useful, more conversational, and just a little less... frustrating, most users probably won’t care whose model is running under the hood.
