John Giannandrea’s time at Apple will officially come to an end this week. Giannandrea’s time at Apple began back in 2018, following an eight year term heading up AI at Google. He was Apple’s head of machine learning and AI.
While Giannandrea’s exit from Apple was announced back in December 2025, he was reportedly serving in an advisory capacity until his final round of stock awards were fully vested. That happens on Wednesday, April 15. Such a move isn’t uncommon, and is known as “resting and vesting.”
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports in the latest edition of his Power On newsletter that Giannandrea’s plans for his Apple afterlife is to “join some company boards and do advising work in the startup world.”
It was announced in December that former corporate vice president of AI at Microsoft Amar Subramanya would take over as vice president of AI, with Giannandrea serving as an advisor until spring 2026. Subramanya reports to Apple engineering chief Craig Federighi, and leads Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI Safety and Evaluation.
Before his tenure at Microsoft, Subramanya spent 16 years at Google, where he was head of engineering for Google’s Gemini Assistant. Subramanya has “deep expertise” in both AI and ML research that Apple says will be important to its “ongoing innovation and future Apple Intelligence features.”
Apple attempted to put a positive spin on Giannandrea’s exit.
“We are thankful for the role John played in building and advancing our AI work, helping Apple continue to innovate and enrich the lives of our users,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “AI has long been central to Apple’s strategy, and we are pleased to welcome Amar to Craig’s leadership team and to bring his extraordinary AI expertise to Apple. In addition to growing his leadership team and AI responsibilities with Amar’s joining, Craig has been instrumental in driving our AI efforts, including overseeing our work to bring a more personalized Siri to users next year.”
Apple CEO Tim Cook had stripped away control of the Siri team from Giannandrea back in March 2025, following reports that Cook had “lost confidence” in his ability to “execute on product development.” Apple exec Mike Rockwell took over the Siri project, while the rest of Giannandrea’s responsibilities were handled by Eddy Cue, Craig Federighi, and Sabih Khan.
Giannandrea’s departure cames in the wake of the iOS 18 personalized Siri fiasco, when Apple unveiled what it called a smarter, “Apple Intelligence” version of Siri at WWDC 2024. It demonstrated an advertised several features of the functionality when marketing the iPhone 16, even though the features were far from being finished. In early 2025, Apple finally announced that it would not be able to release the promised version of Siri as planned, and would not be able to do so until spring 2026. That unveiling has since been delayed until iOS 27, which will be previewed in June at Apple’s WWDC 2026 developer event.
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