Apple has finally explained why the new Siri AI took so long to arrive. At a tech talk held with the press after the WWDC 2026 keynote, Siri lead Mike Rockwell revealed that Apple already had a working version of Siri AI last year. However, Apple decided to scrap it and start from scratch. And that explains why the new Siri was delayed over and over again.
Apple Had a Working Siri Last Year, Then Tore It Down
After leading the Vision Pro effort, Mike Rockwell took charge of Siri in March 2025. During the tech talk, he was quite candid about what happened behind the scenes and development around Siri AI. Rockwell says Apple had built a first version of the new Siri last year that was more of an incremental version.
It was built on top of the original Siri assistant with tool calling support. The problem was that it didn't deliver the experience Apple actually wanted.
So the team went back to the drawing board. Rockwell says Apple "tore it to the ground, rebuilt it from the ground up" on top of its new Foundation models rather than release something it was not happy with.
And because of that, the timeline for the new Siri was pushed even further. The new Siri AI assistant in iOS 27 is a full-blown rebuild and not just a patch on the old Siri. Rockwell describes the result as "a profoundly more capable Siri".
The new assistant has its own standalone Siri app, it's natively multimodal, can access your personal context and can perform multi-step tasks. It was also built with privacy baked in from the very beginning. Importantly, it's the same Siri everywhere on all Apple devices, so you get a consistent experience across the entire ecosystem.
As for Google's Gemini AI involvement, the new Siri runs on Apple's 3rd-gen Foundation Models, but these were refined using outputs from Google's Gemini models. Craig Federighi was pretty blunt and told the press that "the amount of the Google Assistant we use is none". For the new Siri AI, Apple is not using the Gemini app, Google's deployment infrastructure or Google Search.
If you want to try the new Siri AI right away, go ahead and install iOS 27 developer beta and check out our guide on how to get the new Siri AI on your iPhone by joining the waitlist. But before that, go through Siri AI compatible devices list and see if your iPhone makes the cut.
