Apple unlocks siri to the ai jungle, ends chatgpt’s exclusive reign

Apple just ripped the velvet rope. Starting next month, Siri will stop flirting only with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and start speed-dating every generative model that knocks: Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, whatever comes next. The assistant that once whispered “I’m exclusive” is now the town square of intelligence.

The quiet break-up that resets the map

People forget how rushed the 2024 deal was. Apple needed neural firepower for iOS 18 but had no frontier model ready; OpenAI needed 1.4 billion screens. A shotgun wedding followed: ChatGPT became the ghost inside Apple Intelligence, Apple funnelled questions it couldn’t answer to someone else’s cloud. Tim Cook called it “a pragmatic shortcut.” Engineers called it “air-gapped adulthood deferred.”

Deferred no longer. iOS 27, iPadOS 27 and macOS 27 drop the exclusivity clause. A new Extensions panel will let users pin their favourite bot—Google’s Gemini for spreadsheets, Anthropic’s Claude for long document sums, Perplexity for live web stitches—while Siri plays traffic cop, routing each query to the model it deems fastest, cheapest or most private. Apple will still score the interaction, stamp its privacy wrapper and, crucially, keep the telemetry. The trove of routing data becomes Apple’s training gold.

Mark Gurman, who has watched every pre-WWDC leak since 2011, says the switch flips 8 June, the opening keynote. Sources inside the Siri reorganisation tell me the team has spent nine months rebuilding the assistant’s front end in SwiftUI, stripping out the old NLParser that choked on multi-turn context. The result: a standalone Siri app, icon neon-etched, dock-ready, finally worthy of the 2011 promo video that promised “the world in your voice.”

Power move or admission of defeat?

Framing matters. Apple calls this “model democracy.” Critics call it “model surrender.” Because if you own the best silicon—M-series GPUs that sip watts while cranking 40 teraflops—why outsource cognition? The answer sits in a Santa Clara lab where Apple’s own large-language effort, codenamed Project Mulberry, keeps missing milestones. Internal benchmarks show Mulberry trailing GPT-4o by 18 % on code completion and bleeding memory on 128 k-token windows. Rather than ship a weaker brain, Apple rents every brain.

The money still flows. OpenAI loses guaranteed per-query revenue from Apple devices, but gains a bidding war: Gemini and Claude will now pay placement fees to become the default extension. Google already budgeted $1.3 billion for 2025 traffic acquisition; half may pivot to iOS. Apple pockets the toll while it finishes its own chip-optimised transformer. Translation: the house always wins, even when the house hasn’t finished the attic.

Users, meanwhile, inherit a paradox of choice. Siri will suggest the “best” engine, yet the criteria remain opaque—latency, accuracy, carbon footprint, who knows? Apple insists the decision log stays on device, cryptographically sealed. Skeptics hear the echo of 2015, when Apple promised differential privacy and still shipped ad categories so precise they could infer pregnancy before the subject knew.

The ripple beyond cupertino

Hardware rivals feel the chill. Samsung’s Galaxy ai banked on Gemini exclusivity through 2026; the contract contains a clause that lets Google renegotiate if Apple opens the floodgates. Amazon is scrambling to slip Alexa into the Extensions menu before June, praying users still remember its name. Start-ups that built wrappers to graft ChatGPT into Apple shortcuts watch their moat evaporate overnight.

Regulators in Brussels, already probing Apple’s Core Technology Fee, now sharpen questions about self-preferencing. If Siri nudges users toward Apple’s eventual in-house model once Mulberry ships, is that a new gatekeeping layer? Margrethe Vestager’s team has requested the routing algorithm under antitrust transparency rules; Apple offered a black-box audit, no source code. Expect fireworks by September.

Developers, at least, get a new toy. A beta API surfaced last week lets third-party apps register custom extensions—imagine a Bloomberg terminal plug-in that pipes market data directly through Siri, or a medical app that silently consults Hippocratic-optimised Claude. The first demos run on-device with 256-bit encryption; if the pattern holds, enterprise will pay Apple for private lanes the way they once paid BlackBerry for BES.

The cultural fallout lands closer to home. For a decade, Siri jokes were shorthand for robotic stupidity; now the assistant becomes a shapeshifter, sometimes witty like ChatGPT, sometimes omniscient like Perplexity. The voice that misheard “play Shakira” as “call Shakira” could soon summarise your tax return, book a drone taxi and draft a break-up text in the tone of Rainer Maria Rilke. The uncanny valley just got crowded.

Apple will market this as freedom. Analysts will tout it as a $15 billion annual services bump. Users will notice only that the little coloured orb finally answers without the dreaded “Here’s what I found on the web.” If that sounds minor, remember: the last time Apple fixed a broken interface, it eliminated the home button and rebuilt mobile commerce in its image.

Silicon Valley’s oldest truism still applies—when you can’t beat them, broker them. Only this time the broker owns the mall, the payment terminal and the customer’s face. ChatGPT’s exclusive iPhone romance dies on 8 June. Siri’s harem era begins. And Apple, patient as ever, keeps charging rent while it finishes the real palace behind the scaffolding.