Apple says its AI is still private, even when it's running on Google's servers

CUPERTINO, California—Apple announced earlier this year that its long-delayed Siri upgrade, announced this week as “Siri AI,” would use Google’s Gemini language models. What the company confirmed at its Worldwide Developers Conference yesterday was that it also ran on Nvidia hardware installed in Google servers. But the company is still making the same privacy promises it did before, when all of its AI models were either running locally on your devices or on Apple-controlled server hardware. For years, Apple has touted user privacy as a key benefit of using its platforms. Its cloud services use encryption that’s intended to keep other people—including Apple employees—from being able to gain access to it. And the company has long advertised its use of on-device processing for things like scanning images, keeping as much data as possible from leaving your device in the first place. But with Apple Intelligence, Apple has run up against the limits of its own hardware. The kinds of language and reasoning models that can run locally on an iPhone or Mac are relatively small, limiting their capabilities and accuracy. Apple’s Private Cloud Compute system was a partial solution but relied on Apple’s own server hardware; to get the kind of capacity it would need to support Siri AI, Apple would have had to commit to a huge data center buildout that it has so far avoided. Apple’s Craig Federighi and other Apple executives got on a smaller stage after the WWDC keynote to explain to the press and other media how it planned to preserve user privacy while still getting the kind of compute capacity it needed and what its partnership with Google meant. The Google Cloud servers don’t yet support all the same protections as Apple’s own Private Cloud Compute servers, but Apple says it “will be gradually ramping towards the complete set of protections throughout the summer preview period.” Important decisions, like which model to use and what apps have access to what data, are handled by an on-device feature Apple calls the “System Orchestrator.” Among its duties is making sure that only the data needed to answer a user query is sent off-device in the first place (your device could generate an answer about a recipe you were sent in the Messages app, for example, without getting information about the person who sent it to you, when they sent it, or why they were sending it). “While we absolutely minimize what is sent up to PCC, the critical thing about PCC is, architecturally, that’s at that point an efficiency measure,” said Federighi. “Because PCC itself, by design from the ground up, is going to vaporize any record of that data the moment after it answers your question… This is not stored. It’s all in a form where it’s completely transient.” Siri AI and the other new Apple Intelligence features will launch as part of iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27 Golden Gate, and Apple’s other operating system releases this fall. The first beta versions are available to developers now, but most people would be better served by waiting until July to try it, when a more stable public beta version will be released.