Apple owns the device most people would hand an AI agent, yet its assistant is the one that does least. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, as relayed by The Verge, the company is now trying to close that gap quickly, with chief executive John Ternus pressing AI chief Craig Federighi to speed up the Siri roadmap so it can compete with OpenAI's Dots and Meta's Muse.
The reported plan comes in three stages. First, Siri gets fine-grained control over Apple's own apps, such as rotating and cropping images in Photos or sorting Safari tabs, expected with iOS 27.3. Second, and more significant, Siri would act inside third-party apps, for example placing an order through Grubhub or booking a table through OpenTable; Gurman expects that in the spring. Third, Apple wants Siri to handle ongoing tasks that run over time rather than one-off commands, and Gurman believes that could arrive as early as next year.
That third step is where the rivals already are. In our reviews, OpenAI's Dots run as always-on agents inside ChatGPT, each with its own cloud computer and browser, starting at $100 a month on ChatGPT Pro, while Meta's Muse is free to start and lives in its own app and WhatsApp. Both keep pursuing a goal without the user prompting every step, which is the behaviour Gurman says Apple ultimately wants.
Apple's advantage, if it delivers, is reach. An agent built into the phone's operating system can act in apps people already use, without a separate subscription or a new app to learn, and it would arrive on a huge installed base at once. The disadvantage is time: by the reported schedule, the features that matter most are the furthest away.
Treat all of this as reporting, not an announcement. Apple has not confirmed the timeline, and Gurman's account comes through a secondhand summary. Acting inside other companies' apps also depends on developers exposing the right hooks, and nothing reported so far says how Apple will handle permissions, payments or mistakes when Siri books the wrong table. The Verge notes Federighi delivered a working Siri AI on a very short timeline, but even Apple, by this account, does not think it is keeping pace yet.