Craig Federighi stood on the WWDC stage on June 8 and demoed the Siri Apple has been promising for two years. It finally works. It holds a conversation, remembers context, runs your apps without falling over. The room applauded.

The part nobody clapped for: the brain inside it belongs to Google.

Apple is paying Google roughly $1 billion a year for a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter Gemini model to power Siri and the rest of Apple Intelligence. The two companies confirmed it in a joint statement on January 12. WWDC was just the reveal — iOS 27 ships the Gemini-powered Siri to the public in September.

Put that number next to Apple's own. Its current on-device foundation model runs around 150 billion parameters. The Gemini model it's renting is eight times bigger. The most valuable company on earth looked at its homegrown AI, looked at Google's, and decided its own wasn't good enough to ship.

This is the same Apple that spent 2024 selling Apple Intelligence as a privacy-first, built-in-house revolution. In December it quietly named Amar Subramanya — a former Google and Microsoft executive — as its new VP of AI. The direction was set before the Gemini deal even leaked.

The money flow is almost comic. Google already pays Apple about $20 billion a year to be the default search engine on the iPhone. Now Apple pays a billion back so Google can think for Siri. Cash leaves Cupertino, a sliver returns, and Google walks away owning the intelligence layer on 1.4 billion devices it doesn't even build. Alphabet touched a $4 trillion valuation the day the deal went public. Not a coincidence.

There's collateral damage. Apple's 2024 deal to wire ChatGPT into iOS now looks like a placeholder. OpenAI got the headlines; Google got the contract. And it all sits on top of an antitrust ruling that already branded Google an illegal monopoly in search — the same ruling that still lets it cut distribution checks to partners like Apple. The remedy for monopoly, apparently, is more monopoly.

Apple swears your data stays safe. The Gemini weights run inside Apple's Private Cloud Compute, hardware-isolated, nothing stored, nothing handed back to Google. I believe the engineering. That was never the worry.

The worry is dependency. Elon Musk — who runs his own AI shop in xAI — called the deal "an unreasonable concentration of power." This time the hyperbole undersells it. Apple just made its flagship AI feature a tenant in someone else's house.

My Opinion

I'll be blunt: this is the most expensive white flag in tech history. Apple didn't "partner" with Google. It outsourced the one capability everyone agrees defines the next decade, and it's paying a billion dollars a year for the privilege of renting it.

Here's what bugs me. Apple sits on more than $160 billion in cash. It has the best silicon team alive. It had three years and a blank check, and it still couldn't build a Siri it was willing to put its own name behind. So it bought one and stapled the Apple logo on top. Vertical integration was the entire religion — the chip, the OS, the services, all Apple, all the time. The brain of the most personal product they make is now licensed from a rival.

And the dependency compounds. Every iOS cycle, Siri improves because Gemini improves. Apple's incentive to fix its own models shrinks each year the check clears. By the time this contract comes up for renewal, Google won't be a vendor — it'll be load-bearing. Next time someone tells you Apple values its independence, ask them who's running Siri.

Author: Yahor Kamarou (Mark) / www.humai.blog / 14 Jun 2026