Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is in early discussions about using Google Gemini to power a revamped version of the Siri voice assistant, marking a key potential step toward outsourcing more of its artificial intelligence technology.

The iPhone maker recently approached Alphabet Inc.’s Google to explore building a custom AI model that would serve as the foundation of the new Siri next year, according to people familiar with the matter. Google has started training a model that could run on Apple’s servers, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private…

Internally, Apple is holding a bake-off to see which approach will work best. The company is simultaneously developing two versions of the new Siri: one dubbed Linwood that is powered by its models and another code-named Glenwood that runs on outside technology.

The story of Apple’s AI qualms has been a long-running story on this site, and nobody — not even Apple, perhaps — knows how it will conclude. On one hand, the Answers team appears to be working on Linwood and the “more personalized Siri” while tearing down the antiquated Siri fabric that prevented Apple from working on it for years. On the other hand, Apple’s services people are frantically searching for new deals, whether that be an acquisition of Perplexity, a deal with Anthropic to bring Claude to iOS, enhanced ChatGPT integration, or some kind of Gemini deal. Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, explicitly said the company hopes to have a deal with Google, but the possibility has been mired in the Google antitrust trial controversy.

Gurman’s Friday reporting appears to be the closest Apple and Google have gotten to a Gemini deal. I think it’s a profound waste of time for Apple to be pursuing any contract that would end up replacing or augmenting the current ChatGPT integration in Siri and Writing Tools, because they’re often just useless. If they work as intended, people would be raving about them. There’d be TikTok videos and YouTube Shorts all about how Siri is amazing now, thanks to ChatGPT, and why everyone should buy a new iPhone for Apple Intelligence. None of that happened because Siri’s integration with ChatGPT is asinine and dog-slow, to the point where it’s more efficient and easier to just open the ChatGPT app from a shortcut or widget and type in a question there. Siri has no purpose other than to set timers and check the weather. I believe Apple knows that.

Simultaneously, it’s rather bemusing that Apple has even mulled over handing all AI overhead to Google, perhaps its chief competitor, because it can’t get its engineers and C-suite under control. If we’re to (recklessly) assume Apple’s “more personalized Siri” ships before iOS 27, that leaves Siri in an interesting position where its core technology stack is powered by Google, but its personalization features are built by Apple. How that would work is inscrutable. Would Apple send Google information about future updates to the new Siri so Gemini can be trained on how to use them? This is more than a collaboration — Google is actively developing products for its competitor. It’s more than an application programming interface.

Gurman’s quick aside on how Anthropic demanded more money than Apple was (apparently) willing to pay also puts into question Google’s objective. My hunch is that it’s chiefly to dissuade further antitrust cases from Washington, or even to prevent a forced divestiture of Chrome if it can kick the can down the road long enough. But you’d think Google’s natural partner in a scheme like that would be Samsung, which already has Gemini built into all of its phones, but perhaps Google thinks it would make more of a mark to help Apple, a primary competitor? That argument seems less than sound because Google’s whole problem is the search engine deal with Apple — the judge’s ruling in that case was that Google’s agreement with Apple prevented other search engines from prospering. The Justice Department could argue the same collusion here.