Apple thanked John Giannandrea for his efforts. Apple thanked John Giannandrea for his efforts. Siri-us setback: Apple's AI chief steps down as company lags behind rivals Apple's head of artificial intelligence, John Giannandrea, is stepping down from the company. The move comes as the Silicon Valley giant has lagged behind its competitors in rolling out generative AI features, in particular its voice assistant Siri. Apple made the announcement on Monday, thanking Giannandrea for his seven-year tenure at the company.

"I'm not going to respond to that," Siri responded. I had just cursed at it, and this was my passive-aggressive chastisement. The cursing was, in my view, warranted. I was in my car, running errands, and had found myself in an unfamiliar part of town. I requested "directions to Lowe's," hoping to get routed to the big-box hardware store without taking my eyes off the road.

Craig Federighi's opening remarks were nearly derailed by a protester who snuck into WWDC 2025 Monday afternoon. It's not clear what the protester said while they tried to interrupt Federighi's presentation of iOS 26, CNBC reported. Several major technology events have been interrupted by protests recently, most of which supported Hamas and protested the tech industry's business ties to the Israeli government. Apple CEO Tim Cook closed out Monday presentation of the company's new operating system by announcing that iOS 26 is now available to developers for Beta testing today. That means a pre-release version of the iOS 26 operating system for iPhones is now accessible for registered Apple developers to test.

Google, Meta, and Microsoft, as well as startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, all had well-developed strategies for generative AI by the time Apple finally announced its own push this June. Conventional wisdom suggested this entrance was unfashionably late. Its leaders say the company is arriving just in time--and that it's been stealthily preparing for this moment for years. That's part of the message I got from speaking with key Apple executives this fall about how they created what is now called Apple Intelligence. Senior vice president for software engineering Craig Federighi is a familiar character in an ongoing web series in the tech world known as keynote product launches.

After Apple's product launch event this week, WIRED did a deep dive on the company's new secure server environment, known as Private Cloud Compute, which attempts to replicate in the cloud the security and privacy of processing data locally on users' individual devices. The goal is to minimize possible exposure of data processed for Apple Intelligence, the company's new AI platform. In addition to hearing about PCC from Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, WIRED readers also received a first look at content generated by Apple Intelligence's "Image Playground" feature as part of crucial updates on the recent birthday of Federighi's dog Bailey. Turning to privacy protection of a very different kind in another new AI service, WIRED looked at how users of the social media platform X can keep their data from being slurped up by the "unhinged" generative AI tool from xAI known as Grok AI. And in other news about Apple products, researchers developed a technique for using eye tracking to discern passwords and PINs people typed using 3D Apple Vision Pro avatars--a sort of keylogger for mixed reality.

The new mobile OS can rewrite your text messages, summarize emails, and identify objects in photos. But one of the most fun features is Image Playground, which generates cartoon-like illustrations based on a text prompt. While Apple has shown examples of its output during its keynotes, demos, and product videos, we have yet to see a real-world example of an Image Playground character until now. Apple has shared with WIRED the first-ever example created by Image Playground that it's shown outside of its pre-recorded keynotes and marketing materials. Her name is Bailey, and she belongs to Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering at Apple, who created the image for his wife in honor of Bailey's recent birthday.

As Apple launched the new iPhone 16 at its'Glowtime' event last night, it was the company's latest AI features which took centre stage once again. Now, Apple has finally revealed that its highly anticipated Apple Intelligence will begin to roll out in the US next month. As part of the iOS 18.1 update, iPhone 16 users will get access to AI features including rewriting tools, summarised notifications, and big improvements to Siri. However, UK tech fans will need to wait a little while longer as the California-based tech giant says that Apple Intelligence won't arrive there until December. So, with the rollout of Apple's first-ever AI tools just around the corner, MailOnline breaks down what is coming and when you can expect to try it out.

Apple is apparently looking to take all the help it can get to integrate generative AI into its recently announced Apple Intelligence. According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, citing sources with knowledge of the discussions, Apple has held talks with Meta about the possibility of using the company's generative AI model. It also reportedly had similar discussions with startups Anthropic and Perplexity. As of now, though, nothing has been finalized, WSJ reports. At WWDC earlier this month, Apple officially announced its much-rumored partnership with OpenAI that will bring ChatGPT to newer iPhones, iPads and Macs with the upcoming generation of the devices' OS.

While companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others had been upfront about their efforts in AI, for years Apple had been silent. Now, finally, its executives were talking. I got an advance look one day. Eager to shed the the impression that the most innovative of the tech giants was a laggard in this vital technology moment, its software leader Craig Federighi, services czar Eddie Cue, and top researchers argued that Apple had been a leader in AI for years but just didn't make a big deal of it. Advanced machine learning was already deep in some of its products, and we could expect more, including advances in Siri.

The pitch offers an implicit contrast with the likes of Alphabet, Amazon, or Meta, which collect and store enormous amounts of personal data. Apple says any personal data passed on to the cloud will be used only for the AI task at hand and will not be retained or accessible to the company, even for debugging or quality control, after the model completes the request. Simply put, Apple is saying people can trust it to analyze incredibly sensitive data--photos, messages, and emails that contain intimate details of our lives--and deliver automated services based on what it finds there, without actually storing the data online or making any of it vulnerable. It showed a few examples of how this will work in upcoming versions of iOS. Instead of scrolling through your messages for that podcast your friend sent you, for example, you could simply ask Siri to find and play it for you.