Apple and Google announce deeper partnership, Siri to receive “Gemini AI Dock”

Starting today, the “brain” of the iPhone will be partially defined by Google.

Early this morning.googletogether withAppleReleased a joint statement on their multi-year, in-depth collaboration on AI services -Apple to rely on GoogleGeminiand cloud technologies to build Apple's base model.The two giants that were originally at war over operating systems are unexpectedly moving toward convergence in the AI era.

▲Google and Apple released a joint statement (Source: Social Media Platform X)

According to a statement obtained from Apple by foreign media outlet CNBC, “After careful evaluation, we believe thatGoogle's technology can provide the strongest foundation for Apple's base model, and we are excited about the innovative new experiences it will bring to our users.”

As soon as the news was released.MuskJumping out on social media platform X, he bluntly said, “This concentration of power seems a bit unreasonable considering Google also owns Android and Chrome.”

▲ Musk's comments on the incident (Source: social media platform X)

The netizens also have their own opinions about this century hand in hand. Some netizens believe that “[the cooperation] isThe right initiative”, but still issued a sharp question, “If they are fine-tuning the Gemini modelingCan you still call it an Apple base model?”One person said straight out, “This is a really nice comeback to the losers who tout iOS as better than Android.”

Given that Apple has previously partnered with OpenAI, some have speculated that the main reason it partnered with Google may have been “the realization that theOpenAI's upcoming consumer-grade AI device will compete with the iPhone."

▲Some netizens' comments on this incident (Source: social media platform X)

Some netizens, on the other hand, questioned the privacy issues behind the collaboration: “Curious'Will Apple still use privacy as a selling point after the partnership.After all, it's hard to be convinced that Google is involved.” In response, a joint statement from Google and Apple mentioned that the models will continue to run on Apple devices and the company's private cloud computing platform.

▲Netizens' comments on the incident (Source: social media platform X)

Whatever the reason, the survival anxiety of Apple's AI team is visible to the naked eye. According to Bloomberg's report in the middle of last year, core members of Apple's AI team have confessed that the team“It's like a ship that's been sunk for a long time, only now it's being discovered.”third consecutively bouncedThe large model version of Siri is already a tricky “half-baked” internally, “fixing one bug and then three more”.("Exposed big model version of Siri sucks: bugs can't be fixed! Apple re-tools for smaller models, with a change at the helm")

The cooperation, is Apple through the Google Gemini brain to change the Siri “fool” the status quo direct initiative.However, this move has a limited impact on the country line users, Apple AI is currently only a small number of users gray-scale testing, and by the policy may choose to use Baidu Wenxin, Ali Tongyi thousand questions and other large domestic models.

Google's stock has continued to climb since the release of the Gemini 3 in November 2025, and its market capitalization surpassed Apple's $3.8 trillion last week for the first time since 2019, up to4 trillion dollars. This makes it the fourth publicly traded company to reach this ultra-high market capitalization after Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple.

▲Google's share price trend in the last 5 days (Source: Tencent Self-Selected Stocks)

First, hand in hand with Google, Apple may pay 1 billion dollars a year

Previously in August, Bloomberg reported that Apple was in early talks with Google about plans to use a customized Google Gemini model to power a new generation of Siri. according to the report, Apple plans to pay aboutUS$1 billion (approx. RMB 6.97 billion)to use Google's AI technology.

This is another important sign that Google is accelerating its AI strategy and pushing back against OpenAI.

In 2025, Google recorded its best results since 2009, a 16-year period.In the third quarter of 2025, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in an earnings call that the company's cloud business unit signedThe number of deals exceeding $1 billion is more than the past two years combined.

▲Google CEO Sundar Pichai

The transaction, so that the long time to pay for Apple's Google “turn around” to earn money from Apple.

Google's annual payment to ApplePaying billions of dollarswhich makes it the default search engine for the iPhone. But the lucrative partnership was once called into question after Google was found to have an illegal monopoly on the Internet search market, and in September, a judge rejected a ruling that could have forced Google to divest its Chrome browser business, a decision that also allowed it to continue to make deals like the one it made with Apple.

Second, the big model version of Siri is exposed to suck, Google Gemini to the rescue

Bloomberg quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that the big model version of Siri is now a tricky “half-baked” product, with engineers describing development as “a game of whack-a-mole”, where “fixing one bug brings up three more”. "InternalHigh-level miscalculations, power struggles, and technological internal friction.Among other challenges, a core member of Apple's AI team admits that the status quo is “like a ship that sank a long time ago and is just now being discovered.”

Since the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT in late 2022, Apple has largely been in the middle of the AI craze that has swept through Wall Streetmarginalized.

Judging from the actions of several giants, Amazon has built hyperscale data centers and AI-oriented cloud services, Microsoft has spent billions of dollars to provide AI products, tools, and infrastructure for its customers, and unicorns such as OpenAI and Anthropic are also taking off.

This has increased the pressure on Apple to roll out the Siri AI upgrade, and although Apple has been advertising the Siri AI upgrade for the last year, it ultimatelyDeferred upgrade to 2026.In a statement at the time, the company said, “It's taking longer than we expected to implement these features, which we expect to roll out next year.”

This June's 2025 WWDC developer conference, the original plan to debut a large model upgrade Siri will once again jump. Its stock price immediately had an obvious reaction, and some foreign media reported thatWall Street is more concerned about Apple's Siri continuing to jump the gun.

▲Changes in Apple's share price on the day (Source: Google Finance)

Third, Apple and OpenAI cooperation changes? Little impact on China line users

It's not clear if the collaboration will affect Apple's existing partnership agreement with OpenAI.

Apple's collaboration with OpenAI was officially announced at WWDC 2024 on June 10, 2024, and GPT-4o powered ChatGPT came to Apple EcoOpenAI in December of the same year with updates to iOS and other updates.Apple integrated ChatGPT into Siri and Apple Intelligence, primarily for processing complex queries that can utilize this AI model world knowledge for complex queries.

Apple told CNBC in today's feedback thatThey will not be making any changes to the agreement, and OpenAI has not yet commented on this.

The cooperation has limited impact on the country line users. As of January 2026, the China line version of Apple Intelligence is still not officially online. However, some netizens revealed that the China line version of Apple Intelligence is in a small-scale gray-scale testing (iOS 26.2), only for some iPhone 15 Pro/16 series, real-time translation and other functions are still limited.

Because of the policy requirements, the country version of the probability of using local large models, such as Baidu Wenxin, Ali Tongyi thousand questions, depth of search DeepSeek and other cooperation programs, rather than directly using ChatGPT, Gemini.

Conclusion: Global AI Race Enters New Stage of Ecological Showdown

Apple ultimately chose to bet Siri's AI future on Google's Gemini, confirming once again that OpenAI's ChatGPT is less irreplaceable and that Google Gemini has risen to the top.

This multi-billion dollar, multi-year cooperation is expected to be a key step for Apple to catch up with the AI wave, and is a landmark battle won by Google in the battle against OpenAI. The giants are combining their efforts, and the global AI race has entered a new stage of resource integration and ecological duel.