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Apple's new chief executive has run out of patience with incremental fixes. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, CEO John Ternus held a closed-door meeting with software chief Craig Federighi in recent weeks and told him plainly: improving Siri is no longer enough. Apple needs to move faster — and aim higher.
The intervention matters because of who is giving it, who is receiving it, and what it says about the world's most valuable consumer-technology company. Ternus only became chief executive on September 1, succeeding Tim Cook, and he has put strengthening Apple's artificial-intelligence competitiveness at the centre of his agenda. Federighi, the man being pushed, is the executive who oversees Apple's software — and, by reputation, its most prominent internal AI sceptic.
What Ternus reportedly wants
According to reports from The Apple Post and Chosun Biz, drawing on Gurman's Power On newsletter, Ternus pressed Federighi to accelerate Apple's software roadmap and embrace AI with more urgency than rivals have shown. The goal is not a better voice assistant that answers questions. It is an autonomous AI agent — software that can grasp what a user is trying to achieve and carry out complex tasks across multiple apps on its own.
Siri, which handles more than 2.5 billion requests a day, is the starting point. Gurman reports that Apple is working to evolve Siri into an agent that can compete with products such as OpenAI's Dots, Meta's Muse and xAI's Grok — and that as early as next year, Siri's behaviour could move closer to that of an agent. The same newsletter flags a shake-up in how Apple develops iOS 28, the software cycle in which an agentic Siri could first appear.
Why the push, and why now
The pressure reflects frustration over what Ternus is said to see as a lack of urgency compared with other technology companies. Federighi took charge of Apple's AI efforts after a leadership shake-up last year, and observers have described him as wary of the technology's privacy, security, societal and employment implications. That caution is now colliding with a chief executive who has decided AI is the defining race of his tenure — and who has already shown he will act on that belief, including by cutting engineers' daily AI budgets from $300 to as little as $25 in a push for efficiency, according to reports.
There are signs of churn beneath the surface, too. Gurman also reports that Siri engineering chief Mike Rockwell is weighing an exit next year. Apple has not publicly confirmed the meeting with Federighi, the account of what was said, or any product plan — everything here traces to Gurman's sources, and it should be read as reported, not confirmed.
What it means for the iPhone in your pocket
For users, the stakes are simple: the assistant that sets timers and reads messages could become the software that books, plans and completes tasks without being told each step. That is the promise every major AI company is now chasing, and it is also the capability that raises the hardest questions — about what an agent is allowed to do on your behalf, what it can access, and who is responsible when it gets something wrong.
Apple's answer, historically, has been to arrive late and define the category anyway. Ternus appears to be betting that the company can still do that with AI — but only if it stops treating Siri as a feature to be polished and starts treating it as a product to be rebuilt. On Gurman's reporting, that is exactly the instruction he has now given. Whether Federighi's organisation can deliver it, and on what timetable, is the question that will decide whether Apple's AI catch-up is a comeback story or a cautionary one.
For more on the AI race shaping this decision, see our report on Anthropic's $1 trillion IPO hitting a wall — and on Apple's last big launch under its new leadership, the "Welcome Home" event.