Apple reveals new AI architecture built around Google Gemini models

Very Apple-ish approach to AI catch up: wrap an external tool in a privacy architecture, embed into the OS and productize the orchestration layer.

It will be interesting to see if the Private Cloud Compute + on-device routing can make third-party model capabilities feel like a first-party system without leaking user context to the model provider.

If Apple handles the Google-Apple boundary right, this will be an elegant move on their part, otherwise it will feel like Apple Intelligence with a just a privacy-polished frontend for Gemini.

Not launching in EU feels like a smell. It does look interesting enough for me to try it out before disabling Apple Intelligence again.

> The company reiterated that Apple Intelligence relies on on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, with a promise that user data is only used to execute the immediate request and is not accessible to Apple or third parties. Apple added that outside experts can verify those privacy guarantees "at any time."

Yes, the "Apple needs to look at your data to do this, but we don't have any way to look at the data if we wanted to". That's impossible, unless they open souce iOS and let people take control over their devices, and let people self host inference, so people can check that there is no network traffic. If it is as they say, they could let people host it without any downsides.

I would love to learn more about what's actually powering Apple Intelligence now. Are they using flagship Gemini models behind their own prompts? Fine-tuning? Pre-training their own models based on Gemini?

Is there a meaningful distinction between the Gemini-powered models and Apple Foundation Models? Does that distinction vary for on-device vs hosted models? Are some models running on Apple's Private Cloud Compute and others running on Google iron?

Edit: they elaborated significantly in a "keynote tech-talk": [0]

According to Apple, there are five models:

On-Device

- AFM Core: Dense architecture; the standard next-gen on-device model

- AFM Core Advanced: Sparse architecture, natively multimodal; enables features like image understanding and expressive voices

Private Cloud Compute

- AFM Cloud: Workhorse server model optimized for latency and cost

- AFM Cloud Image: Image generation and editing

- AFM Cloud Pro: Most capable model, Gemini frontier-level quality, for complex reasoning and agentic tasks; runs on NVIDIA GPUs in Google's cloud under Apple's PCC privacy guarantees

Everything excluding Cloud Pro are custom models running on Apple Silicon, "refined" using Google Gemini. About Cloud Pro, they say "this is our most capable model with quality similar to Gemini frontier models." So I might read between the lines and say this is a wrapped Gemini.

  [0]: https://9to5mac.com/2026/06/08/craig-federighi-details-apples-collaboration-with-google-for-siri-ai-in-ios-27/

It's strange to me that Apple would choose to disadvantage themselves by selecting Google as their provider as opposed to, say, Anthropic or even OpenAI. Doesn't this mean they'll struggle more to differentiate themselves from the assistant on Android phones? Thinking more cynically, couldn't Google, if they wanted, feed Apple an inferior version of Gemini, ensuring they stay ahead?

As the consumer, this just sucks because it means no matter which phone platform you choose, you're getting the same thing underneath, and there's no way to avoid it (besides not using an assistant entirely, which I recognize a lot of people do, myself included).

I've been a paid subscriber to Claude for a couple of years, but lately I've been reaching for the free Gemini app on my Android Pixel 9 because it's so good at doing searches as part of its answers. The model feels fresh and up to date. Whether Apple can incorporate that search is an open question

Maybe I'm wrong, but this seems to strongly undercut Apple's claims about privacy.

A lot of people are missing that Google is light years ahead in terms of edge AI. They've been going on about it even before the GPT-craze. Pixel phones have had live captions (on edge transcriber) for a while.

This move kind of reminds me of the original iPhone with google maps. You're competing with google, but you're using their infrastructure. Why wouldn't they just go with another provider like OpenAI or Anthropic?

It is weird and disturbing that Apple has no native AI capability.

This is one of the most cash rich companies in the world and it has failed to have any position in the most critical technology development perhaps ever.

It's a clear signal that Apple became the most incredible operational/execution company under Tim Cook, but lost its innovation leadership.

Wait, if it's Gemini why do they call it "Apple Intelligence"? Is Google okay with that?

I'm happy with this so long as the cloud side of things can be entirely disabled.

Google apps are the most downloaded apps in the Apple App Store already. This reminds me of the original Apple Maps, which was just a front end for Google Maps.

Just as long as you speak a major language

I'm really not looking forward to Gemini models on my devices.

Gemini models clearly gaslight the user and hallucinate, they're also SUPER verbose, as shown in the demos from the keynote.

Plus, if they're not charging a subscription for this, you know we're getting the dumbest models...

Any word on pricing for Private Cloud model usage? (It's only free if your app has had <2 million downloads, and it has rate limits.)

what i think why they are too much relying on Google is coz they are way much towards making models open source and launching more much better models to public as if in future apple part way from google they might still have much better models to rely on and if we see the history google has been partnered with Apple since the launch of first Iphone

So they run on TPUs and not Nvidia chips?

I honestly don’t understand how anyone can believe that Apple is limiting user options for privacy reasons, rather than trying to maintain an unfair advantage over other vendors.

I’m not saying people who hold this view are being dishonest at all. But sometimes, to me, brands like Harley-Davidson or Apple seem closer to a cult than to a typical corporation.

Maybe now we'll get a good voice prompt experience with Gemini on iPhone out of this deal.

Another one bites the dust

What a blunder, they resisted AI for like 2 years when it was all the buzz, and now when the bubble is about to bust and every user has AI fatigue they decide to finally dip into the fad?

Before it was as if avoiding AI was a conscious design decision, and if there was an AI crash, Apple would be the only survivor left. Now it feels like they weren't in on the meme out of incompetence and are now late to the party.

No one can know what Jobs' stance would be, but I like to think he would be anti-slop

Apple could have done something like bedrock and used a SOTA model but instead they are fiddling with local models or whatever.

Also I have seen that Apple has some strange lust towards image generation as if that's what people really want. I have this slop image generation thing on my phone and it is useless.

Here's what I want: natural language interaction to achieve complex workflows in iPhone. Example: find the cheapest way to go from A to B and book it using the Deutsche Bahn Train app.

Why is Apple providing people with a photorealistic deepfake generator so they can participate in dressing down women, digital blackface, and god knows what else? This is crossing a line, and simply saying "well other big tech companies crossed it first!" is not an excuse.