In an interview with tech podcast TBPN, Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman said that Apple had initially planned to “rebuild Siri around Claude,” the large language model and chatbot developed by the company Anthropic. However, Apple ended up opting instead to partner with Google to use its Gemini platform.
Gurman says Apple went with Google due at least partially to money. As in Anthropic wanted too much.
“Anthropic was holding them over a barrel,” said Gurman in a clip shared by TBPN. “They wanted a ton of money from them, several billion dollars a year, and at a price that doubled on an annual basis for the next three years.”
So, Anthropic blew it, even though they already had a foot in the door at Apple.
“Anthropic is powering a lot of the stuff Apple’s doing internally in terms of product development and a lot of their internal tools,” he explained. “They have custom versions of Claude running on their own servers internally, too.”
Bloomberg's @markgurman says that even though Apple partnered with Google Gemini for Siri, they actually run their business on Anthropic.
"Apple runs on Anthropic at this point. Anthropic is powering a lot of the stuff Apple's doing internally in terms of product development and… pic.twitter.com/NpW0Pyj03J
— TBPN (@tbpn) January 29, 2026
Apple was “not going to use Google” for the revamped Siri until “a few months ago,” he said.
Earlier this month, Apple and Google released a joint statement announcing that Google Gemini will not only power Apple’s more personalized Siri virtual assistant, but also a range of other Apple Intelligence feature. The more personalized Siri is expected to debut alongside the release of iOS 26.4, which is expected to enter beta testing in February, with a release to the public likely to take place in March or April.
Apple’s decision to rely on Google’s artificial intelligence technology should result in the new version of Siri being more capable and advanced than it otherwise would have been, thanks to using Gemini’s large language model, which is significantly larger than Apple’s own model.
Apple first announced its new personalized Siri, as well as other upcoming new Apple Intelligence features at WWDC 2024, unfortunately, Apple faced several delays in releasing the new features. Apple’s development problems have led to today’s joint announcement.
