Apple is working to provide an upgrade to its artificial intelligence voice assistant for iPhones, with investors pessimistic about the progress of a major artificial intelligence product that could be released at its flagship annual launch event next week. Recently departed employees told the Financial Times that the Silicon Valley giant has had challenges updating Siri with cutting-edge large-scale language models that can make more complex responses to voice prompts.
Apple has been trying to build its own large language model (LLM) based on the machine learning technology that currently powers Siri, which is used in hundreds of millions of its best-selling devices, with the goal of creating a truly conversational assistant.
Former Apple executives say the process of integrating the technologies has created holes that have never been faced by competitors like OpenAI, which built voice assistants based on generative artificial intelligence from scratch.
"It's clear that you're not going to reinvent Siri by doing what executives call 'climbing the hill,'" meaning gradually developing the product rather than rebuilding it from the ground up, said one former Apple executive. "Obviously they made a mistake," the person added.
Updates to Siri are an important part of Apple Intelligence. "Apple Intelligence" is a set of artificial intelligence features Apple announced at Worldwide Developers Conference last year in an effort to boost hardware sales.
The Financial Times reported this week that Apple's attempts to roll out these AI features in China, powered by models developed by Alibaba, were blocked by regulators in Beijing. Sensitive transactions involving U.S. technology companies have come under greater scrutiny in China due to the trade war launched by U.S. President Donald Trump.
Already-announced Apple Intelligence features have repeatedly failed to launch, meaning expectations for this year's WWDC, which kicks off next week, are low.
"We're now in a position where investors already know what the potential good news is, which is: We first need to make sure you deliver on what you promised last year," said JPMorgan's Samik Chatterjee.
Artificial intelligence woes have weighed on the tech giant's stock price. It's the worst performer among the so-called "Seven Big Tech Stocks of 2025," down about 18% since the start of the year, even lower than the tech-heavy Nasdaq, which is essentially flat.
Trump's tariffs, competitive threats from China and legal pressure on Apple's highly profitable services business have also stoked investor concerns about its long-term growth.
At the heart of Apple's AI woes lies its traditional voice assistant, Siri, which is considered the key to unlocking true "agent" capabilities on iPhones and other Apple devices.
When ChatGPT launches in late 2022, "the way companies engage in conversational interactions is changing rapidly, and it's clear that Siri is falling behind," said another former senior Apple employee who was involved in the development of the technology before ChatGPT was released.
The person added that they were "surprised" to see that features announced last year ended up "not being implemented when Apple Intelligence was first released."
In addition to running larger, more powerful models, companies like OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity have all launched voice assistants that are widely considered smarter than Apple.
The iPhone maker's answer was to focus last year's annual developers conference on its own AI push, where it showed off an AI-boosted assistant that could read users' screens, leverage their contextual information and take action within their apps.
A range of AI features such as writing assistance, image and emoji generation, and camera-based search are already entering the market.
However, Siri's innovations haven't been officially released yet. CEO Tim Cook recently admitted that the technology did not meet the company's "high quality standards" and was "taking a little longer than we expected."
The delay led Apple to pull a TV ad starring "The Last of Us" star Bella Ramsey to promote the Siri update. The company has been the subject of numerous consumer false advertising lawsuits.
Bank of America analysts wrote on Monday that Siri's current delays mean it will essentially be three years or more before Apple can launch a "truly modern AI assistant, well behind Google and others integrating such technology."
These failures led to changes within Apple. In 2018, Apple poached artificial intelligence expert John Giannandrea from Google, and earlier this year the Siri product division was removed from his purview and handed over to Mike Rockwell, the executive behind the Vision Pro headset.
A former Apple executive said a fragmented leadership team led to a lack of a unified strategy around artificial intelligence, which was made worse by executives' initial lack of interest in allocating adequate budget to building out the technology.
Another challenge is Apple's emphasis on user privacy and security. The company prioritizes running its AI capabilities through smaller models and keeping user data on the device. Former employees say that adds another layer of complexity to the challenge.
This is in contrast to larger LLMs like OpenAI ChatGPT, which run via powerful servers in the cloud. Apple also took advantage of OpenAI and launched the integration of ChatGPT and Siri.
Since then, OpenAI has also shown its ambitions in the hardware field, and its CEO Sam Altman announced the acquisition of IO for $6.5 billion. IO is a company founded by former Apple designer Jony Ive, who will now develop products for a potential competitor. Apple shares fell about 2% on the news.