Apple is working on turning Siri into an agent. Mark Gurman reported for Bloomberg that CEO John Ternus is pressing AI chief Craig Federighi to move faster, with the goal of an assistant that can keep up with OpenAI’s Dots or Meta’s Muse. The Verge summarized the reporting on Sunday.
Two steps are lined up. The first gives Siri fine-grained control over Apple’s own apps: rotating and cropping images in Photos, organizing tabs in Safari. That is expected to land with iOS 27.3. The second is the bigger one — reaching into other companies’ apps, so Siri could place an order through Grubhub or book a table through OpenTable. Gurman puts that in the spring.
From a single command to an ongoing goal
After that, Siri is supposed to become genuinely agentic, taking on continuing tasks instead of one-offs. Gurman describes the difference by pointing at the competition: Dots, Muse and Grok keep track of goals, work out the next step themselves and carry on without someone initiating every individual move. Apple wants to go there too, and Gurman thinks Siri could work that way as early as next year.
The line he adds is worth noting: Apple does not have much of a choice, given current demand.
Federighi delivered, just not fast enough
According to Gurman, Federighi shipped a functional version of Siri AI on an extremely short timeline. Even so, nobody inside the company is under the illusion that Apple is keeping pace with its rivals.
That is the part I find most interesting. The hard work in putting an agent on a phone sits with permissions: grants, revocation, an audit trail, and an interface where you understand what is about to happen before you tap. We have watched exactly this work show up in every Claude Code changelog for months — modes, exemptions, confirmations, deny rules.
Apple starts on a platform with billions of devices, many of them owned by someone who has never opened a terminal. How Apple answers “is Siri allowed to do that?” will shape more people than anything in our config files.