Apple has struggled to keep up with the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google with its AI technology, with the long-promised Siri upgrade repeatedly delayed. It's now trying to fix that: At WWDC 2026 today, we got details of the biggest Apple Intelligence upgrade since it launched, with a focus on understanding users and keeping data private.
The updates will roll out across iPhones, iPads, and Macs, and was announced by Apple's senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi—who started with a dig about some AI companies moving too fast and neglecting the priorities of users (not a bad way to reframe Apple's previous problems with AI development).
As we knew already, Apple has partnered with Google to develop its new Apple Foundation AI Models, though you won't see a Google logo or "powered by Gemini" message anywhere. Apple has tailored the Gemini models for its own purposes and says there's now improved understanding across text, voice, and images.
Apple's new AI models will understand you better. Credit: Apple
There are four central components to these new models: Personal context (knowing about you and your preferences), world knowledge (drawing in data from the web and other sources), actions (being able to complete tasks inside apps), and on-screen awareness (knowing what you're doing on your device).
Some of the examples Apple showed for personal context included knowing about upcoming birthdays, favorite recipes, and locations you've visited. All of this information could be pulled into AI responses or routines to make them smarter.
Different models will run on devices and in the cloud, and be kept fully private—so not even Apple will be able to see your data and AI interactions. As has always been the case since Apple Intelligence launched in 2024, Apple uses what it calls Private Cloud Compute to only process data in the cloud when it's absolutely necessary, and to delete the data right after the processing is done.
What do you think so far?
World knowledge has also been improved in the new models. Credit: Apple
These privacy protections are audited by third-party security specialists, Apple says, so you can be sure your data isn't being analyzed or kept. The company is clearly going to continue to lean on privacy as a way of differentiating itself from its competitors.
In terms of the specific benefits you'll see from these new AI models, you should get smarter, faster responses in apps and in the newly upgraded Siri app. These technologies are going to power Apple AI across all of its products—enhanced by a new System Orchestrator that was flagged up by Federighi—and will work everywhere from enhancing photos to dictating text.
Of course, this isn't the first time Apple has hyped up future upgrades coming to its Apple Intelligence technology—we won't be able to assess these changes fully until they're pushed out into iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.
