Apple is moving to close a widening gap in the AI assistant race by accelerating its agentic Siri roadmap, according to reporting from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The effort is being driven by internal pressure from CEO John Ternus, who has urged AI chief Craig Federighi to speed up delivery of a more capable Siri that can compete with rival agents such as OpenAI’s Dots and Meta’s Muse.
While Federighi’s team managed to ship a working version of Siri’s AI features on a notably short timeline, the company reportedly has no expectation that the current iteration keeps pace with competing products. The next phase of development is intended to change that.
Two Staged Updates Expected
The first of two planned improvements is slated to arrive with iOS 27.3. This update would give Siri granular control over Apple’s own applications, enabling actions such as rotating and cropping images inside Photos or organizing tabs in Safari. It is a narrower but foundational step: teaching the assistant to manipulate first-party software with precision before opening the door to outside developers.
The more consequential change—integration with third-party apps—is expected to follow later, in the spring. That capability would allow Siri to carry out real-world tasks through external services, such as placing a food order via Grubhub or booking a dinner reservation through OpenTable. Such functionality would mark a significant shift from Siri’s traditional role as a voice-driven query tool toward something closer to a task-completing agent.
From One-Off Commands to Ongoing Goals
But app control is only the beginning. According to Gurman, Apple ultimately wants Siri to operate in a more agentic fashion—handling not just isolated requests but sustained objectives. Competing systems like Dots, Muse, and Grok can already track user goals, decide what step comes next, and keep working toward an outcome without requiring the user to prompt every individual action.
Gurman reports that Apple intends to move in that direction and believes the company could make Siri more agent-like as early as next year. He also notes that market and consumer expectations may leave Apple with little alternative but to pursue that path.
A Competitive Necessity
The pressure is not merely internal. The broader AI landscape has shifted toward agents that can autonomously manage multi-step tasks, and Apple’s rivals have already staked out that territory. For Apple, the challenge is to extend Siri’s capabilities without losing the reliability and integration that define its ecosystem.
The staged rollout—first-party app control in iOS 27.3, third-party integration in the spring, and more advanced agentic behavior possibly by next year—suggests a deliberate approach rather than a single leap. Whether that timeline proves fast enough to satisfy both leadership and the market remains an open question.
