For most of its history, Apple's competitive advantage rested on vertical integration: hardware, software, and services all controlled by the same company, talking to each other in ways competitors could not replicate. The decision, reported by Bloomberg this week, to open Siri to rival AI assistants in iOS 27 represents something close to the opposite of that logic. It is a concession that Apple cannot build a competitive AI brain on its own, and that the better strategy is to become a platform for other people's brains instead.
The mechanics are straightforward enough. Siri can already call on ChatGPT through Apple's partnership with OpenAI, established last year. iOS 27, expected to be unveiled at WWDC in June, will extend that capability to other AI services. The new Siri will also get a dedicated app and a refreshed "Ask Siri" interface that works across Apple's operating systems, finally giving it the chatbot-like experience it has conspicuously lacked while competitors pulled ahead.
The context matters here. Apple spent years promising a smarter Siri and then repeatedly delayed delivery. Meanwhile Google built Gemini into Android, Amazon revamped Alexa, and OpenAI, through its ChatGPT app, accumulated hundreds of millions of active users on Apple's own devices. That last detail is the most uncomfortable for Apple: the product most people reach for when they want an AI assistant runs on iPhones but earns no revenue for Apple beyond a rumoured cut of OpenAI subscriptions. The company is essentially landlord to its own competition.
Opening Siri to more rivals does not fully solve that problem. If users can invoke Claude or Gemini as easily as ChatGPT directly from the lock screen, Apple remains in the position of building the stage while others perform on it. But there is a strategic argument for embracing this role rather than fighting it. The smartphone market is mature. Apple's growth increasingly depends on services revenue, and a platform that hosts multiple AI assistants can extract value from all of them, through subscriptions, API fees, or the sheer stickiness of the Apple ecosystem.
There is also a regulatory angle. Antitrust authorities in both the EU and the US have scrutinised the way Apple and Google shape access to AI on mobile devices. Demonstrating openness, even if it comes somewhat late, is useful insulation against the argument that Apple is leveraging its platform dominance to disadvantage AI competitors.
What remains unclear is how well Apple can execute a role it has never played before: neutral host for competing intelligence services. The company's instinct is to control the experience end to end. A future where Siri routes queries to whichever AI is best suited, and where users have genuine choice between providers, requires a level of openness that sits awkwardly with how Apple normally builds things. Whether iOS 27 gets the balance right, or whether it offers the appearance of openness while quietly advantaging Apple's own first-party features, will be worth watching closely when the details emerge in June.
For users, the near-term picture is straightforwardly good: more AI options, more competition, and a device that might finally catch up to what Android users have had for the past two years. For the AI industry, Apple's platform shift is another confirmation that the frontier model providers have won the intelligence layer. The question now is who controls the interface that sits between those models and the user, and whether Apple can reclaim that role even if it cannot build the model itself.