Overview
- Bloomberg reports Apple will pay roughly $1 billion per year for access to Google’s AI technology.
- The revamped assistant is internally called Linwood and is targeted for spring 2026 within iOS 26.4.
- Apple tested models from OpenAI and Anthropic before selecting a custom Gemini estimated at about 1.2 trillion parameters.
- Apple positions the arrangement as a stopgap while it races to build an in‑house model of roughly 1 trillion parameters despite recent AI talent losses.
- In China, Apple plans to use homegrown models with Alibaba-provided content filtering because Google services are blocked.