Siri Might Need an Urgent Upgrade from OpenAI or Anthropic

Apple’s AI stumbles have been pretty obvious, but the most apparent of them all is arguably its long-awaited overhaul of Siri. In case you haven’t been paying attention, AI Siri was supposed to be released alongside Apple Intelligence last year, but Apple has reportedly both tried and failed to get its new AI-centric voice assistant up to snuff since then. Those efforts, which are still very much ongoing, may finally see a major breakthrough, according to a recent report from Bloomberg. There’s just one caveat—Apple’s AI team might have little to do with said breakthrough.

As reported by Bloomberg, Apple may enlist the help of either OpenAI or Anthropic, the makers of ChatGPT and Claude chatbots, respectively, to give Siri a much-needed brain transplant. While the discussions aren’t final, Apple is reportedly in talks with both companies about using specialized versions of their models that are powered by Apple’s cloud infrastructure. Which company Apple chooses—if any—remains to be seen, but it’s worth noting that Apple already has a preexisting partnership with OpenAI, which lends its large language model (LLM) to run certain features in Apple Intelligence.

For lots of reasons, a potential partnership between OpenAI or Anthropic wouldn’t just be another collaboration; it would be a tacit admission on Apple’s part that it continues to struggle with cracking the code on AI. Apple has often intentionally taken the wait-and-see approach with emerging technologies, but its foray into AI has felt less intentional, especially when it comes to Siri. Apple’s voice assistant was originally billed as the centerpiece of Apple Intelligence—Apple’s cross-platform suite of AI features—and was featured heavily in marketing for those features’ rollout. Given the fact that it’s still not here and that Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi had little explanation as to why during Apple’s annual developer conference, we can assume things are not going as planned.

That’s obviously not a great look for a tech company that often claims it has the latest and greatest of everything gadgets and software have to offer, but for the people who actually use Apple’s devices and services, it could be a major win. Siri has long struggled to improve beyond simple tasks like setting timers or skipping a song on Spotify, and—let’s be honest—even then, the results can be variable. Chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude and the LLMs that power them are naturally suited for natural language prompts like the ones you’d want to throw at your voice assistants, and the more they can understand, the more they can actually do for you.

To be fair, Siri isn’t alone in its struggles. Voice assistants were billed as a revolution for ambient computing a decade ago, but have struggled to actually assume the role of AI companion for lots of reasons—privacy and technical limitations chief among them. Chatbots take care of at least one of those core problems with voice assistants. As much as I’d love Apple’s privacy-focused on-device mentality to take the reins on AI, it’s also equally exciting to think that I might actually be able to ask Siri to do real stuff beyond making sure I don’t oversleep. Bloomberg notes that Apple’s in-house efforts to build an AI Siri are still underway, too, so whatever potential partnership is struck may not be forever. Until then, I think it’s safe to say Apple was caught with its pants down on Siri, and Anthropic or OpenAI may be more than happy to put those briefs back on for a small fee.