Apple released the (early beta) version of Siri AI at the 2026 WWDC keynote and it’s already making a few waves. To be completely honest, it’s still got a lot of catching up to do, and is still fairly limited, but it’s a night and day difference compared to Siri, and ‘New Siri’ that never really materialised.

It’s too early to really review, or even fairly preview, Siri AI, but it has had me thinking about what this means for stand-alone AI chatbot services, like Perplexity and even Claude outside of Claude Code / Copilot and the other agentic tools.

Love them or hate them, you can’t deny that Apple, and their products, change the playing field very often. Apple, along with Google with their Photos all, are probably responsible for a lot of standalone photo back up services closing their doors. As soon as the two big OS providers started including photo backup with their devices, the idea of it being a standalone product seemingly died overnight. Photo backup is just a service now, something anyone expects to have with any device they use. 

Since starting to use Siri AI I’ve stopped using Gemini and Claude (again outside of the coding elements) for just general queries and questions. I’ve even reduced my Kagi usage a little for general questions and information. There is absolutely the novelty of it all that will drive me to use it more, of course, but the integration with the wider OS and the fact that it can now (finally) answer questions with decent information and relatively quickly all without having to use a separate app (which you can still do if you want) has already been a bit of a game changer. After just a few days it’s already feeling like just a ‘service’ and part of what I get with an iPhone now. If I didn’t have use for Claude Code (it feels like we all need to be at least dabbling with it for work these days) I wouldn’t think twice of just not using a different AI system again.

As I say, very early days, but I feel like this is already the turning point where the expensive AI tools like Claude Code, ChatGPT Codex and others become very expensive professional applications, only aimed at corporations that have the money to burn on it, and the big players start to back away from targeting consumer users, with Gemini for Android, and Siri AI for Apple devices, becomes the de facto standard.

To be honest, I can live with that if it means AI is used where it’s right and useful to do so, but it’s backed off a little elsewhere.