At WWDC on Monday, Apple unveiled a rebuilt Siri running on a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter Google Gemini model. The deal's reported ~$1B/year price tag — Bloomberg's figure, not Apple's — reframes "Apple Intelligence" as, in part, a licensing arrangement with a rival.

Apple opened WWDC on Monday under the tagline "All systems glow," and the system it most needed to make glow was Siri. The keynote delivered a rebuilt, context-aware assistant that can read what's on your screen and chain actions across apps — the assistant Apple promised at the iOS 18 launch in 2024 and then never shipped.

Here is the part the branding obscures. The new Siri runs on a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter Google Gemini model, under a multi-year licensing deal Apple confirmed in January after testing OpenAI and Anthropic. Apple's architecture routes simple tasks on-device and moderate ones through its Private Cloud Compute; complex reasoning goes to Google Cloud (per TechTimes' keynote coverage and CNBC's January reporting). The roughly $1 billion-a-year price tag comes from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, reported last November — not from Apple, which has disclosed no terms and filed nothing. Treat it as reporting, not disclosure.

The cap-table irony is the leverage. Google already pays Apple an estimated $20 billion a year to be Safari's default search engine — the arrangement the DOJ is appealing. A $1 billion check flowing back to rent the brains of Siri is, against that, a rounding error, and a tidy map of who actually holds frontier AI right now. The most valuable company on earth could not ship a competitive assistant on its own timeline, so it licensed one.

This is also a company that burned this exact trust once: the personalized Siri was demoed in 2024, promoted in ads later pulled, and never delivered. iOS 27 isn't due until September — the same month Tim Cook, per Apple's April announcement, hands the CEO title to John Ternus. Monday was Cook's last keynote.

So watch the ship date, not the demo. Siri is still labeled beta internally, with features behind a waitlist. Until it works on a shipping phone, the glow is a render.