APPLE GIVES UP ON ITS OWN AI, HANDS SIRI TO GOOGLE — THEN BANS IT FROM EUROPE BEFORE IT SHIPS Apple spent years and billions of dollars trying to build its own AI. It did not work. So at WWDC 2026, the company announced it is rebuilding Siri from the ground up on a custom version of Google’s Gemini model, a 1.2 trillion parameter system running on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs that Apple is paying approximately one billion dollars a year to license. That is not a typo. Apple is paying its longtime search rival one billion dollars annually to power the voice assistant it has been selling as a core iPhone feature since 2011. The new product is called Siri AI. It shows up as a standalone app in iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. It can hold real conversations, revisit old sessions, reason through complex tasks, and do things the old Siri never came close to. Apple presented this as a major step forward, and in raw capability terms it genuinely is. Here is the part the press release buried. Siri AI will not be available in Europe or China at launch. Apple says regulatory requirements are the reason. The European Commission immediately and publicly disagreed. Commissioners said Apple’s decision to block the feature from 450 million EU users is a voluntary business choice, not a legal obligation under the Digital Markets Act. The Commission’s interpretation is that Apple chose to withhold the feature rather than comply with rules requiring platform openness to competing AI assistants. So Apple rebuilt Siri on Google, charges you for it, and Europeans do not get it. That is the story. Keywords: Apple Siri AI, Google Gemini iPhone, WWDC 2026, iOS 27 AI features