TL;DR
iOS 27 beta includes Extensions for third-party AI in Siri, but Apple skipped the announcement at WWDC amid EU, legal and messaging headwinds.
Apple’s iOS 27 developer beta includes basic support for a feature the company never mentioned at its WWDC keynote on June 8: the Extensions framework, which lets iPhone users switch between ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini directly within Siri. This was reported by Mark Gurman from Bloomberg the system has a settings panel and a dedicated App Store section with both built in, but Apple’s back-end disabled. According to Bloomberg, Apple has held discussions with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google about licensing the framework.
This feature was highly anticipated. Gurman first reported in March that Apple was building Extensions to replace the two-way ChatGPT contract with an open system that any eligible AI provider could join. TechCrunch described the approach in May as “AI models choose their own adventure.” When WWDC came around, the question was not whether Extensions would launch, but how prominently Apple would place it.
The answer was: absolutely not. Apple devoted its WWDC keynote almost entirely to Siri artificial intelligenceIts redesigned assistant, powered by a custom 1.2 trillion-parameter Gemini model running on Nvidia Blackwell GPUs on Google Cloud. The company introduced a standalone Siri app, personal context features, and a three-level privacy architecture.
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The extensions did not appear in any slides, demos, or press releases. Three strategic pressures help explain why.
The first is the regulator. Apple confirmed during WWDC week that Siri AI will not be rolled out in the European Union, citing pending negotiations with the European Commission over the Digital Markets Act. EU rejects Apple’s Trusted System Agent proposal This would allow rival virtual assistants to access Siri AI’s capabilities without directly exposing sensitive device data.
Announcing a framework that invites third-party AI into Siri while simultaneously telling EU regulators that third-party access poses unacceptable risks would be difficult to reconcile.
The second is legal. OpenAI is preparing for possible legal action against Apple On the ChatGPT partnership launched in June 2024. According to Bloomberg, OpenAI lawyers are working with an outside firm, including on a breach of contract notice.
OpenAI believed the deal would generate billions in subscription revenue, but says Apple hid the integration behind friction and required users to apply publicly.ChatGPT” name and with responses appearing in restricted windows. Announcing Extensions, a system clearly designed to demote ChatGPT from its exclusive position to one of several options, would have heightened this tension at a sensitive moment.
The third is messaging. Apple spent two years rebuilding Siri from the ground up after its original AI plans failed. Siri engineering chief Mike Rockwell said the team had a working version the previous year, but scrapped it because it didn’t meet their vision.
Craig Federighi called Siri AI’s agent-like abilities “experimental.“Apple subverted the reboot narrative by introducing the model selector just as it was trying to convince users, developers and investors that its AI had finally arrived.
Gurman’s hands-on review of the Siri AI beta, published today, shows that the concern is not unfounded. He described the assistant as functional but confused, with slow responses, aborted requests and misunderstood requests. In his estimation, Siri AI is roughly competing with where leading chatbots were about six months ago.
Assistant still can’t handle advanced workloads like research, programming, or data analysis. Apple is expanding access through a waiting list, and will even have a limited public beta in July.
However, the underlying architecture is designed to accommodate Extensions should Apple decide to flip the switch. Google’s Gemini already powers Siri AI under the hood through a contract worth about $1 billion a year. Extensions will sit on top of this and allow users to route specific tasks through their preferred third-party model.
This means that Writing Tools, Photo Playground, and Open Chat may each be provided by a different provider. Apple’s approach would effectively make Siri a platform layer rather than a single provider assistant.
The stakes for Anthropic and Google are significant. The extensions will give Claude and Gemini native access to more than 1.5 billion active Apple devices without requiring users to download separate apps or exit the Siri interface.
For OpenAI, the picture is more complicated. The Extensions system may actually benefit ChatGPT by placing it more prominently through its model selector interface, but it will also end the exclusive position that OpenAI believes it paid for with the original partnership.
The iOS 27 beta code also contains references to a foldable device, internally codenamed V68, expected to debut in September, and macOS 27 includes pull-to-refresh gestures and Sidecar touch input, hinting at a touchscreen MacBook under the codenames K114 and K116. These hardware signals indicate that Apple is building the Extensions framework with new device form factors in mind, not just the current iPhones.
Apple has not publicly confirmed or denied that Extensions will ship with iOS 27 this fall. The framework is in place, discussions with AI providers are ongoing, and regulatory, legal and strategic hurdles are all moving simultaneously. The question is no longer whether Apple will open up Siri to third-party AI. The EU, OpenAI’s lawyers, and Apple’s own messaging discipline will allow this to happen on the timeline Apple originally envisioned.
