APPLE QUIT BUILDING AI. NOW IT'S SELLING YOU SOMEONE ELSE'S.
Your iPhone is about to get a menu.
Bloomberg
reported Monday that Apple is building “AI Extensions” for iOS 27, a system that lets third-party AI models plug directly into Apple Intelligence. ChatGPT, Gemini, Meta’s AI, Perplexity. All competing for the spot Siri was supposed to own. You pick your favorite. Apple steps aside.
This is not a minor feature update. This is the richest company on Earth admitting it lost a two-year head start and deciding to become a shopping mall instead of a store.
The timeline tells the whole story.
June 2024: Apple announces Apple Intelligence at WWDC. The pitch is huge. A smarter Siri that understands context, takes actions across apps, and draws on your personal data. On-device AI. ChatGPT baked in. The iPhone 16 marketing leans on it hard.
September 2024: iPhone 16 ships. Apple Intelligence is plastered across every billboard and Best Buy display. Most of the features aren’t ready. Siri is the same Siri.
October 2024: iOS 18.1 brings writing tools and notification summaries. The summaries immediately start generating fake news headlines. The BBC publicly complains. Apple pauses the feature in January 2025.
December 2024: iOS 18.2 adds ChatGPT integration for Siri and visual intelligence. But the real upgrade, the one where Siri understands your screen and takes action across apps, gets pushed to 2025.
March 2025: iOS 18.4 ships some on-screen awareness. Users call it inconsistent. Apple’s internal teams know the full Siri overhaul isn’t close.
April 2025: Bloomberg reports Apple has
cancelled the crown jewel features entirely. On-screen awareness, personal context, app actions. The exact things they demoed on stage at WWDC. Gone. Pushed to 2026 or 2027. Maybe.
Then came the lawsuits.
A class action filed in May 2025 alleges Apple sold millions of iPhones “on the strength of its AI promises” and delivered “features that didn’t exist.” The suit seeks $250 million. Separately, Apple settled a $95 million Siri privacy case in January 2025 over allegations that Siri recorded private conversations. The BBC sued over the fake notification summaries. A copyright lawsuit targeted Apple’s AI training data.
“Consumers paid premium prices for features that didn’t exist,” the complaint reads. Apple’s response was corporate boilerplate: they’re “committed to delivering Apple Intelligence features over time.”
The stock told the truth first.
Apple briefly hit a $4 trillion market cap in January 2025. By April, it had shed over $1 trillion in value. Jefferies issued a rare “underperform” rating, specifically citing AI. Analyst Edison Lee wrote that Apple’s “AI efforts trail competitors” and the company “risks losing market share.” Morningstar’s headline was blunter: “Apple Is Behind on AI.”
Fewer than half of eligible iPhone users even tried Apple Intelligence, according to Creative Strategies. Compare that to ChatGPT’s 800 million monthly active users. Apple built a feature nobody wanted to use and a promise nobody believed.
So Apple did what Apple does. It pivoted.
The AI Extensions system coming in iOS 27 works like the share sheet or default browser picker. Third-party AI models register as extensions. You choose which one powers your Siri experience. OpenAI, Google, Meta, Perplexity, and others are already in discussions.
TechCrunch called it a potential shift that “could have major implications for the broader AI industry.” AI companies get direct access to Apple’s billion-plus active iPhones. Apple gets to stop pretending it can out-build OpenAI. Announcement expected at WWDC in June.
The Verge put it plainly: this is Apple’s “biggest shift in AI strategy since it launched Apple Intelligence at WWDC 2024.”
