Apple’s Siri has been the punchline of every AI comparison since ChatGPT launched. Ask Siri to do anything complex and it apologizes and suggests a web search. Two years of iPhone users watching Google and Anthropic outrun Apple’s voice assistant. Then, quietly, Bloomberg reported that Apple had a different plan all along.

iOS 27 will ship with a new “Extensions” system inside Siri. Open Settings, pick your preferred AI — Google Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Amazon Alexa, Perplexity, xAI’s Grok, Meta AI — and that service handles Siri queries directly. Apple will announce this at WWDC on June 8. OpenAI’s deal, signed in 2024 as the exclusive AI partner inside Apple Intelligence, is effectively over. Seven competitors just walked through the same door.

The numbers tell the real story. There are approximately 1.5 billion active iPhones globally. Apple’s App Store already processes hundreds of billions in transactions per year, taking between 15 and 30 percent commission. Now every Claude Pro subscription, every Gemini Advanced upgrade, and every Perplexity purchase made on an iPhone funnels money through Apple’s payment rails.

Siri isn’t getting smarter. Apple is turning it into a router — a front door that forwards requests to whoever the user trusts most. The AI companies do the R&D, pay billions in compute costs, race to improve their models. Apple collects rent.

The Extensions system doesn’t require Apple to build anything particularly new. It’s an API contract. A chatbot app installed from the App Store gets permission to receive Siri queries. From an engineering standpoint, this is far less ambitious than what Google did building Gemini or what Anthropic did with Claude. From a business standpoint, it may be the most profitable AI move Apple has ever made.

For OpenAI, this stings specifically. The ChatGPT integration Apple announced at WWDC 2024 was celebrated as a massive distribution win — billions of users suddenly had a path to ChatGPT through their iPhones. That exclusivity lasted less than two years. Sam Altman’s company now competes for attention in a Settings dropdown alongside Grok, Gemini, and Claude.

My Opinion

I’ll be direct: Apple just executed the smartest AI business move of 2026, and most people were too busy laughing at Siri to notice.

I don’t think Apple was slow on AI. I think they made a calculated decision to wait, watch the market clarify, and then build the distribution layer rather than the product layer. Building AI is expensive and brutal. Building the platform that all AI must pass through to reach 1.5 billion users? That’s an entirely different game. Apple didn’t lose the AI race. They decided to own the finish line instead.

Here’s what concerns me: this is bad for competition in the long run. Every AI company must now ship through Siri, pay App Store fees, and fight for attention in an Apple-controlled menu. The same playbook that created a permanent levy on mobile software now creates a levy on AI. The industry is burning $10–15 billion a month in compute. Adding Apple’s margin on top accelerates consolidation — only companies with deep enough pockets survive the race to the tollbooth. The irony writes itself: the company with the worst AI product may end up capturing the most AI revenue.

Author: Yahor Kamarou (Mark) / www.humai.blog / 28 Mar 2026