Apple is close to a deal that would have it pay Google roughly $1 billion a year for a custom 1.2 trillion-parameter Gemini model to revive Siri, according to Bloomberg. The model, which would handle summarizing and multi-step task planning, dwarfs Apple’s current cloud-based Apple Intelligence model (150 billion parameters) and would run on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers, keeping user data off Google’s systems, per the report. Apple tested models from OpenAI and Anthropic before settling on Google, with Anthropic’s fees reportedly too high.

The effort to look into a third-party provider for Siri’s AI-powered smarts, internally called Project Glenwood, was overseen by Mike Rockwell. It is expected to arrive in an iOS 26.4 update next spring. Apple also plans a 1-trillion-parameter in-house model as soon as 2026, when it hopes to replace Gemini. The company already receives about $20 billion a year from Google for default search placement, but this arrangement is different: it is an engineering dependency, not a revenue stream.