Apple outsourced Siri's brain to Google.

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Hello, Curse and Coffee friends,

Today, we explore Apple and Google’s AI bombshell.

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The take: The company that designs its own chips rather than buy from Qualcomm is renting Google's AI to fix its voice assistant.

What happened: Apple is finalising a $1 billion annual deal to use Google's Gemini model to power a Siri overhaul launching spring 2026.

Why it matters: Apple tested Anthropic's Claude. It performed better. But Anthropic wanted a multibillion-dollar fee that increased each year. Apple chose cheaper over smarter.

What to watch: iOS 26.4 lands in March or April. That's when we find out if renting Google's brain makes Siri competitive (or just less embarrassing).

The company that wouldn't let Google Maps stay on the iPhone is now letting Google run Siri's reasoning.

Before we slurp into today’s brew…

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This is what a decade of underspending looks like.

Apple's 2025 capital expenditure was $12.7 billion. Google's was $92 billion. Amazon's was $125 billion. Meta's planned spending is $71 billion.

Apple chose a "hybrid" strategy. Their own chips, rented cloud capacity, no massive Nvidia-powered data centers. Which worked when AI was a feature.

AI is now the product.

Apple's in-house model runs on 150 billion parameters. The one it's renting from Google has 1.2 trillion.

A gap you pay someone else to fill.

Google gets $1 billion a year. Apple gets a competitive Siri (maybe).

And the company that built its reputation on controlling every layer of the stack just handed its voice assistant's brain to a rival.

Pro: Apple's done this before. It leaned on Google Maps, Intel chips, and the Weather Channel until its in-house versions were ready. This is a bridge, not a surrender.

Con: Siri is the interface. Outsourcing the brain changes who controls the conversation.

Our read: A bridge works if you're building something on the other side. Apple says it's developing a 1-trillion-parameter model internally. Until it ships, Google owns Apple's AI story.

[Primary] Sam Altman, December 2025

OpenAI's CEO has named Apple — not Google — as his company's primary long-term competitor.

"Whoever controls the AI-first hardware that people carry and wear every day will ultimately control how consumers experience advanced models."

Why it matters: Altman acquired Jony Ive's hardware startup for $6.5 billion. He's hired more than 40 Apple engineers. He's designing a "family of devices" aimed at late 2026. Apple is renting Google's AI while OpenAI builds the replacement for the iPhone.

EditorialGE

Google pays Apple $20 billion a year to be on the iPhone. Apple is paying Google $1 billion a year to make Siri work. One company is the landlord. The other is the tenant.

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