If you use Siri or Google every day, this matters. Alphabet ignored an investor question about its AI partnership with Apple during Wednesday’s fourth-quarter earnings call, signaling it is not ready to explain how the deal affects its AI business.
The partnership aims to power AI for Siri, but the payoff for Google is not clear yet. Historically, the two tech giants have profited from working together. Google paid Apple $20 billion to be the default search engine on iPhones, giving Google access to Apple’s 2.5 billion active devices worldwide.
The new AI deal reportedly costs Apple roughly $1 billion per year. Unlike search ads, which appear at the top of results, ads in AI Mode are still an experiment, appearing below or integrated into chatbot responses. Google is also testing “Shop with AI Mode” to guide users from product questions to checkout directly inside AI.
Competitors are already shaking things up. Anthropic is launching a Super Bowl ad challenging ad-supported AI, taking aim at models used by Google and OpenAI.
Even Alphabet executives barely mentioned the Siri deal. Sundar Pichai said Apple would be the “preferred cloud provider” and help develop “the next generation of Apple foundation models based on Gemini technology,” and Philipp Schindler used the exact same wording. No timeline, no details, no clear plan.
For now, the question is who will benefit from this AI partnership and who could end up paying in the form of higher costs or slower innovation. Every Google search and Siri interaction could eventually feel the effects.
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