Apple is racing to make Siri more agentic

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, as relayed by The Verge, CEO John Ternus is pushing AI chief Craig Federighi to speed up Siri's roadmap so it can compete with agents like OpenAI's Dots and Meta's Muse. Apple reportedly knows it isn't keeping pace.

Two near-term steps are expected: deeper control of Apple's own apps, like editing photos and organizing Safari tabs, expected with iOS 27.3, and third-party app control, such as ordering through Grubhub or booking through OpenTable, likely in the spring. Gurman believes a more fully agentic Siri could come as early as next year.

We think this is the right direction and overdue. An assistant that can act inside the apps people already use is far more useful than one that answers questions. Apple's advantage is distribution and its control of the operating system; if Siri can reliably cross app boundaries, that's a capability competitors can't easily match on iPhone.

The hard part is reliability. One-off commands are forgiving. Ongoing tasks, where the assistant tracks a goal and decides next steps without the user approving each one, are not. An agent that books the wrong reservation or places the wrong order costs people money and trust. Apple's brand has been built on things that just work, and agents are still probabilistic.

I'm also watching the pressure itself. A CEO pushing to accelerate, a company that knows it's behind, and a market that demands agents is exactly the setup in which corners get cut. Apple has leaned on privacy as a differentiator; an agent with standing permission to act across apps is a much larger privacy and security surface. Questions about what data it sees, what it can spend, and how users undo its actions need clear answers before launch, not after.

If this scales, the phone becomes the primary place where AI acts on our behalf, and app makers become suppliers to whichever assistant controls the screen. That's convenient for users and a real power shift away from developers. Our read: Apple should ship this, but slowly enough to get the guardrails right.

Reporting describes Federighi as having delivered a functional Siri AI on a short timeline. Rival assistants named in the report, including Dots, Muse and Grok, are described as able to keep track of goals and pursue them across steps without user prompting at each stage.