Apple Explores Turning Siri Into an Autonomous Agent as Soon as Next Year, Gurman Says

The report puts Siri up against a newer kind of consumer AI product. Gurman compared Apple's assistant with OpenAI's ChatGPT Dots, Meta's Muse and xAI's Grok, which he said "can keep track of goals, determine what needs to happen next and continue pursuing objectives." Siri, by contrast, still waits for a request before it does anything. Apple shipped a more personalised Siri with iOS 27, but the assistant cannot yet act on its own initiative. Gurman wrote that Apple "ultimately wants to go in this direction." Apple has announced no such feature and has not commented.

The newsletter also describes pressure from the top of the company. Chief executive John Ternus held a closed-door meeting in recent weeks with software chief Craig Federighi, who also leads Apple's AI work, and pushed him to speed up the company's AI plans beyond Siri improvements, Gurman reported. Ternus was frustrated by what Gurman described as "a reluctance to embrace AI with the same urgency as competitors." On Apple's latest earnings call, Ternus said the company now had "the kind of Siri that we always wanted", and described Siri as "primarily request-based today" with an "orchestrator-driven architecture" that leaves room to grow.

Gurman also pointed to a second gap: Apple has no equivalent of the computer-use tools offered by OpenAI and Anthropic, which let a model read the screen, move a cursor, click and type. He reported that Mike Rockwell, who has led Siri development, is seriously considering stepping down, and that Amar Subramanya and Sebastien Marineau would probably take on more responsibility if he does.

Nearer-term changes are already in testing. The iOS 27.3 beta gives Siri finer control inside Apple's own apps, with support for third-party apps labelled a preview. Gurman expects the Apple-app capability to arrive as early as December and third-party support probably in the spring.

The report includes a change to how Apple builds its software. Apple normally develops each year's operating systems in stages that pair four weeks of coding with four weeks of "convergence", when new features are integrated into the system. For the first stage of iOS 28, macOS 28 and their companion releases, engineers were instead given six weeks of "coding, exploration and feature development" followed by two weeks of convergence, Gurman wrote. He said employees like the change because it gives them more time to try out ideas before committing to them. He did not describe any specific iOS 28 features.

Apple is spending more as it tries to catch up. Its research and development expenses rose 32% to a record $45.77 billion in the fiscal year that ended in September, from $34.55 billion a year earlier, according to the company's annual results. Apple attributed the rise mainly to higher infrastructure costs, including AI investment, and to headcount, but did not say how much went to AI.

If Apple follows its usual calendar, iOS 28 will appear in beta at the developer conference in June 2027 and be released to the public in September 2027. That would be the earliest window for the kind of agent-style Siri Gurman describes.