For years, Apple and Google have danced around the idea of a partnership concerning artificial intelligence, particularly in enhancing Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant. Apple has been exploring potential collaborations, reportedly considering OpenAI and Anthropic to boost Siri’s capabilities. However, in a dramatic turn reminiscent of a reality TV finale, Apple has officially chosen Google. The tech giant announced that Google’s Gemini AI models will soon be the foundation for a more personalized Siri, slated for release in 2026.

In a joint statement, Apple and Google expressed confidence in their decision, stating, “After thorough evaluation, Apple determined that Google’s AI technology offers the most robust foundation for Apple Foundation Models, promising innovative experiences for Apple users.”

The agreement permits Apple to leverage Google’s Gemini AI alongside its cloud technology to enhance its future models and Apple Intelligence features. Apple emphasized that its intelligence functions will operate on its devices and through its Private Cloud Compute, maintaining the company’s high privacy standards.

This privacy commitment was underscored by Morningstar analysts, who noted that the partnership would uphold Apple’s strong reputation for security. The analysts mentioned that Apple would utilize Gemini on its servers via its Private Cloud Compute for AI processing, and users will likely have the option to share prompts with Gemini directly.

As for what this deal means for the two tech giants, the specifics of their collaboration remain somewhat ambiguous. Whether Google will merely provide its AI models for Apple to develop independently or work closely alongside Apple’s AI team is yet to be clarified. However, the emphasis on “private cloud compute” suggests that Apple’s new arrangement with Google will mirror its existing privacy-focused approach with OpenAI. According to William Kerwin, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar, Apple will probably require user consent before sharing any data with Google, as reported by The Verge.

Despite appearing as competitors, Apple and Google have maintained a longstanding, complex relationship marked by both rivalry and cooperation. For over a decade, the two companies have been linked through an agreement that made Google the default search engine on Apple devices, a move that once generated nearly half of Google’s search traffic. Bruce Sewell, Apple’s former general counsel, described this dynamic to The New York Times as “co-opetition,” a blend of fierce competition and essential collaboration.

Google paid Apple up to $20 billion per year to maintain its position as the default search engine on Apple devices, via Apple’s Safari browser. After a drawn-out antitrust lawsuit, a federal district court judge ruled last fall that Google could continue making such payments. That remedy ruling paved the way for Monday’s announcement — and the “co-opetition” involved means both companies stand to benefit significantly, even though the rumored $1 billion-per-year payment from Apple to Google is in many ways negligible in such a high-value industry.

The comparatively low annual payment helps illustrate how mutually beneficial the partnership is: a win-win for two FAANG companies helping each other bolster the ramparts against the high-flying AI startups that could upset their longtime advantage.

“From Apple’s perspective, it’s certainly a win if you think about the pain that they’ve had in their AI strategy up to this point,” Morningstar’s Kerwin said. “The long and short of it is that they over-promised back in the summer of 2024, and they under-delivered, still, now, what they promised.” He added that the multiyear agreement means that Apple can stop investing in building up a reputation as a frontier model company and focus instead on user experience with a different company’s AI foundation, as well as finally, potentially, becoming a key player in the AI agent providers’ battle for consumer attention — which requires AI agents that are, in theory, so useful that they break into the consumer market in a new and unprecedented way.

On Google’s side of things, Kerwin said, “the win is similar to what they get with their Search in that they become, in the mind of the consumer, a de facto option as an AI model … This will give them a ton more users from the iphone user base and also really cement that brand image as a go-to AI model that supports all these features.”

Even so, experts say, the deal may end up causing the same scrutiny that Google just finished dealing with.

“I think that it was possible from the Google antitrust trial that Google could have been blocked in advance from making deals like this — [it’s] certainly a possible remedy that could’ve been on the table and was not adopted by the judge,” James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School, told The Verge. Part of the government’s case in the Search trial was aimed precisely at preventing Google from making similar sweetheart AI deals, though Google largely got its way on that front.

“That’s not to say that this deal will not raise antitrust concerns, and it’s possible that some years from now Google could be facing a new antitrust trial for being the AI provider to Apple in the same way that it was facing antitrust scrutiny for being the search provider,” Grimmelmann said. “If you think back to when Google started showing up as a default search provider and these placement deals started, that was a less concentrated search market. So it could be that the market could evolve in a way that would make a deal like this more problematic over time.”

The details of the arrangement between Apple and Google aren’t quite clear yet, and those details matter from both an antitrust and an AI business standpoint, said Blake Reid, an associate professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School.

“The core concern around the Apple-Google search deal was that Apple sending such a huge volume of queries to Google would provide Google a moat by making it harder for anyone else to build a competitive search engine,” Reid said. “But is Apple going to be sending data in a similar way here? Apple’s initial statement indicates that they will use Google’s technology as more of a white-labeled technology stack that they will customize and deploy as an Apple service. If Google is only getting money from Apple, that makes the antitrust problem less obvious.”

The announcement also comes after Apple’s much-publicized trials and tribulations attempting to upgrade Siri’s AI capabilities to deliver more personalization and agentic task completion. At the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference last June, mentions of Siri were conspicuously absent, aside from the announcement that previously promised updates were running behind schedule.

“We’re continuing our work to deliver the features that make Siri even more personal,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of software engineering, said during the June event. “This work needed more time to reach our high quality bar, and we look forward to sharing more about it in the coming year.”

That time, evidently, is now. It’s been a semi-embarrassing year for Apple’s AI strategy: Apple Intelligence summaries of messages that were significantly off the mark, TV ads for new Siri features that ran last year (even though those features still haven’t arrived), and reportedly replacing longtime AI chief John Giannandrea with Mike Rockwell, who previously led Apple’s Vision Pro. So the company is turning things around with a new high-profile Google partnership and a suite of coming AI integrations with other startups.

“Apple is concerned that the rise of AI threatens to go completely around it — that it had a unique relationship with users because of its devices and its hardware-software integration, and that AI threatens to circumvent that relationship in the same way that the browser rise of the web deeply threatened Microsoft’s relationship with its users,” Cornell’s Grimmelmann said. “Apple choosing first to try to develop its own AI models and then to partner with Google here — this is its attempt to remain in that relationship and remain relevant.”