Apple is racing to make Siri more agentic

Judgment

Craig Federighi has to sequence Siri's agentic build: ship fine-grained first-party app control with iOS 27.3, then hold third-party app integration until spring and goal-tracking until next year — trading speed for reliability while Dots, Muse and Grok set the pace.

Basis

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that CEO John Ternus is pressuring AI czar Craig Federighi to accelerate the Siri roadmap and deliver an agent that can compete with OpenAI's Dots and Meta's Muse. Federighi has already shipped a functional Siri AI on what Gurman calls an incredibly short timeline, but the company has no illusions it is keeping pace. Two upgrades are staged. The first gives Siri fine-grained control over Apple's first-party apps — rotating and cropping images in Photos, organizing Safari tabs — and is expected with iOS 27.3. The second, integration with third-party apps, lets Siri place a Grubhub order or book an OpenTable reservation, and lands later, in spring. Gurman says Dots, Muse and Grok can track goals, decide what happens next and keep pursuing objectives without the user initiating each step, and that Apple wants to go that direction, possibly making Siri more agentic as early as next year — not that it has much choice given consumer and market demand. The order matters: first-party controls are cheap to ship and stay inside Apple's sandbox; the agentic, cross-app behavior is where parity is actually decided.