Apple’s long‑promised, AI‑heavy overhaul of Siri has run into fresh engineering problems, threatening to push several headline features past their planned March launch. The company had tied the upgrade to the iOS 26.4 release but is now weighing splitting the work across later updates, with some capabilities possibly deferred to iOS 26.5 in May or iOS 27 in September.
Beta testers report the upgraded assistant sometimes fails to parse queries, takes too long to respond to complex requests, and can interrupt users who speak quickly. Two of the most visible features at risk are expanded personal‑data access—letting Siri search old messages and play items shared by contacts—and a richer “app intents” voice control that would let users find, edit and send photos in a single command. Early support exists, but reliability and accuracy remain inconsistent.
The technical stack behind the effort is unusually elaborate. The new Siri is built on an underlying system called Linwood and runs atop Apple’s own large‑language model platform, Apple Foundation Models, while also integrating Google’s Gemini technology. Apple explored deeper collaboration with OpenAI and has already integrated ChatGPT on some devices; testers say Siri has on occasion routed queries to ChatGPT when it should have used Apple’s models.
This setback underscores the broader trade‑offs that have confronted major tech firms attempting to marry cutting‑edge generative AI with consumer privacy and on‑device performance. Apple has sought to differentiate by emphasizing control of data and bespoke models, but reliance on third‑party systems such as Gemini, and intermittent fallback to ChatGPT, shows how difficult it is to deliver fast, reliable AI at scale without hybrid architectures.
For investors and product planners, the delay is a mixed signal. Apple’s shares had earlier been pressured by scepticism about its AI capabilities, but strong iPhone 17 sales and cooling enthusiasm for speculative AI investments have helped the stock outperform peers this year. Still, a slip of high‑profile features risks undermining Apple’s narrative that it can match the functionality of rival assistants while keeping a privacy‑first posture.
Watch for how Apple sequences the rollout. Fragmenting the launch across multiple iOS updates could blunt the marketing impact of a single “Siri moment” and create varied user experiences across iPhone owners. It also raises questions about how Apple will maintain project momentum, manage third‑party model dependencies, and answer regulator and consumer scrutiny over how Siri accesses and uses personal data.