PRODUCTS

Apple's new AI: 3 big wins and 1 notable gap

Apple fixed Siri and put its long-term AI strategy back on track.

On Monday at WWDC 2026 at Apple Park, Apple spent over an hour unveiling the details of its new path in AI, the features of the new Siri, and the other ways that it will use AI to make life better for over a billion humans who use its devices worldwide. 

The day was also significant for being Tim Cook's last WWDC as CEO, and it was an opportunity for Apple to right the ship on AI, the biggest unmet challenge during Cook's tenor at the helm.

During the keynote, Cook said, "The next generation of Apple Intelligence powers an entirely new Siri: making the apps and experiences you rely on across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro more personal and helpful."

If I were to sum up the most important things we learned about Apple's AI strategy, here's what they'd be:

• Apple led with privacy, security, and child safety: Ahead of its announcements of new AI features, Apple did something unexpected. It paused to explain how it was implementing guidelines and frameworks around safety and security. It was as if the company was saying, "Before we put the most powerful technology we've seen in your hands and the hands of your kids, we want to show you how we've created guardrails to handle it safely." That was a breath of fresh air, and I hope it resets the expectations for the rest of the AI industry.

• AI is escaping the chat window: Since 2024, I've been saying the best part of Apple Intelligence has been Apple's intention to disperse AI features throughout its devices in the places we're most likely to use them, rather than making us always go to a chatbot app to access them. That vision gets a lot more real in 2026 with the way AI shows up in the home screen, in writing apps, in the camera app, and more.

• This will bring more people into AI: Apple didn't unveil anything groundbreaking that other AI companies haven't already talked about. It was mostly catching up from a feature standpoint. But it is potentially making these features easier to use, easier to find, and safer to adopt. And with its massive base of fans and installed devices, that's likely to get a lot more people to use AI than the 16% of people around the globe who use it regularly today.

• Agents are MIA: The one area where Apple didn't have as much to say and where it's lagging behind the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google is agents. There's nothing like Codex, Claude Cowork, or Perplexity's Personal Computer, where you give an agent a task or a goal and it goes and figures out how to accomplish it using the apps and context that you give it access to. The closet thing Apple unveiled is an upgrade of the Shortcuts app, where you can prompt it with a goal and it will create an automation for you. That's a baby step toward agents. However, I worry that this is one of the fastest advancing areas of AI and Apple can't afford to wait until next year's WWDC to offer its vision for a safer path to agents.

Perhaps the most encouraging thing I heard on day one of Apple WWDC came from executive Mike Rockwell, who led the Siri overhaul. In a session with the media after the keynote, Rockwell explained that Apple achieved a smarter Siri a year ago, but it decided to go back to the drawing board and reinvent the technical infrastructure of Siri from the ground up so that it would be better prepared to grow and adapt in the years ahead. Rockwell said, "The architecture for Siri is completely modern, and is ready for the future." That and Apple's steadfast commitment to safety were the most important cornerstones of Apple's AI future that we learned about on Monday. The Deep View has other big takeaways that we'll be unpacking throughout the week, as we talk to more people on the Apple team and get our first look at Siri AI in the beta version of iOS 27. So stay tuned. And if you want to follow my insights in real-time, you can find me on X/Twitter at x.com/jasonhiner.

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CONSUMER

Here's where Apple's revamped Siri is ready to roll

Two years after promising a smarter Siri, Apple delivered at WWDC, unveiling an AI assistant set to change how users interact with their devices.

The company made good on the previously announced features, including a Siri with personal context that understands your messages, emails, and photos, plus onscreen awareness for more seamless assistance. We also got new details about the experiences coming this fall, fueled by a smarter, more capable and more conversational Siri.

The additional context will allow Siri to take more action; for instance, you can ask Siri to reference something in a text and then act on it, such as "What was the hotel information that Jason emailed me about? Can you add it to my calendar?" This, combined with on-screen awareness and up-to-date world knowledge, should address the annoying context gaps that Siri presented users in the past and made it difficult for them to get anything done. 

Other new Siri-fueled features include: 

• More voices: Users can customize Siri's expressiveness and pace.  

• Improved dictation: When users speak, there will be more polished text with greater precision, handling capitalization, punctuation, and formatting (similar to Wispr Flow and Google Rambler). 

• Standalone Siri app: This makes it easier to either revisit past conversations or start a new one, and access them all across different Apple  devices. 

• Visual Intelligence: Baked directly into the iPhone's camera app, users can tap the shutter button to give Siri context for what they are seeing and tap into its multimodality. It is also coming to iPad and Mac, via a screenshot or keyboard shortcut, respectively. 

• Writing Tools: Users can activate Siri AI writing assistance virtually anywhere they type. Siri AI will adhere to the user's typical communication patterns. Lastly, Siri now automatically proofreads for users. 

Powering it all is a new architecture for Siri AI, built on Apple Foundation Models co-developed with Google. Apple said these devices could run both on-device and on servers via Private Cloud Compute. To access Siri, users can now say "Hey Siri," press the power button, or swipe down from the Dynamic Island. On Mac and iPad, it is also integrated into Spotlight.

Apple finally delivered on its big AI promises from 2024, and that in itself is a win for Apple users. However, in the larger market, there is a major caveat: the company is ultimately playing catch-up with what other major smartphone manufacturers have been shipping for years. From today's announcements, it seems Apple's biggest competitive edge is how deeply it's integrating its AI features natively. For instance, the updated Visual Intelligence operates directly from the camera app or personal context, integrating knowledge across all Apple applications. As I've been saying since 2024, Apple's best strategy is moving AI from a chatbot app you have to open to a bunch of really smart features in all the places where they make the most sense on your phone and other Apple devices.

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RESEARCH

OpenAI confronts its own disruption amid IPO filing

AI is expected to fundamentally alter the way our economy works. OpenAI is enlisting help to track the impacts.

On Monday, the AI giant launched the OpenAI Economic Research Exchange, a platform supporting external research on AI's economic effects. The exchange will select certain researchers to collaborate on projects, with the goal of producing "credible, independent evidence on how AI is affecting workers, firms, institutions, and the broader economy." 

The exchange is seeking researchers with expertise in a broad range of topics, including applied causal inference, measurement, labor economics, productivity, firms, education, entrepreneurship, public finance, regional economics, development and inequality. The company said that any proposals should include the "carefully governed, privacy-protected" use of OpenAI's tooling as part of the research. 

The company said the exchange is an effort to expand the evidence and data available to researchers, policymakers, businesses, and the public amid "a period of rapid technological change." 

The exchange is not the only sign that OpenAI is preparing for an economic jolt: 

• OpenAI said the exchange is building on the company's broader efforts to track AI's economic impacts, including OpenAI Signals, a research effort launched in February to track workforce adoption of ChatGPT.

• It also follows The OpenAI Foundation's $250 million commitment, announced in late May, to preempt potential economic crises that AI may cause. That funding seeks to build institutional preparedness for economic shocks, including by funding research and measurement to gain a clear understanding of how this tech will impact the economy. 

"Understanding those changes will require more than anecdotes," OpenAI said in its press release. "It will require rigorous empirical research, grounded in real-world evidence and pursued by a broad community of researchers."

OpenAI and its rival Anthropic have amassed a monumental amount of influence and power in the industry. Both, however, are raising concerns about how the tech they are building could upend our economy and society. For instance, OpenAI leaders have called for decentralizing power in AI, while Anthropic has urged the industry to slow development as the tech progresses toward autonomous, self-building systems. However, both firms have now confidentially filed for IPOs, which will naturally encourage them to prioritize shareholder interests, such as profit margins and growth at all costs. So while these companies can say all of the right things, their actions must speak louder than words. 

LINKS

• OpenAI confidentially files for an IPO

• Meta says roughly 20,000 Instagram accounts were hacked via AI tools

• Amazon launches AI-generated custom merch

• Anthropic research says Mythos model can rapidly exploit flaws

• Microsoft shuts down more than 70 GitHub repositories after AI agent hack

• Google, Nvidia consider Intel as a backup chip manufacturer

• AI manufacturing firm PhysicsX raises $300 million at $2.4 billion valuation

• ChatGPT: OpenAI released a number of experience updates for its flagship chatbot, including interactive charts in answers and sending emails directly in chat. 

• Manus: Users can now connect multiple Gmail and Google Calendar accounts to the platform. 

• OpenMDW-1.1: By the Linux Foundation, an open licensing framework designed specifically for AI model distributions. 

• Runway Expand Ratio: Now, you can expand and adjust the aspect ratios on AI-generated videos made with Runway's Aleph 2.0 model.

• Anthropic: Research Scientist, Societal Impacts

• Microsoft: Research Intern - LLM Acceleration

• Applied Intuition: Research Intern - Reinforcement Learning, Robotics

• Workato: Lead AI Research Scientist

GAMES

POLL RESULTS

Would you trust AI agents to handle finance tasks, such as tax preparation?

Yes (23%)
Maybe, but not yet (50%)
No (23%)
Other (4%)