Siri AI agent by 2027? What Ternus wants and what ships first

A Siri AI agent would hold on to a goal and figure out the next steps on its own, instead of waiting for a fresh command each time. Today’s Siri can already read what’s on your screen, search your messages and take actions inside apps, and it can string several actions together in one request. But it can’t keep an eye on something for days and step in when the moment comes.

That is the gap Apple reportedly wants to close. Gurman says he was told Apple eventually wants Siri to work more like xAI’s Grok Bot, Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots. Those tools track objectives, decide what comes next and keep going without being prompted. Dots, for example, can work in the background, monitor connected apps and line up unfinished work for you to approve. Meta has shown Muse finding a permission slip in an email, filling it in and handling follow-up arrangements.

Apple has already hinted at this sort of thing. At WWDC 2026 it showed a background password feature that would spot weak or leaked logins, visit the affected sites, change the passwords and store the new ones in the Passwords app. It showed up in early iOS 27 betas, then vanished, and is still listed for a future release. Code has also turned up for an unfinished Siri memory graph, meant to link details about your relationships, places and routines, though there is no finished feature or date for it.

The near-term upgrades are smaller but concrete, and they arrive in two steps.

• iOS 27.3 (possibly as early as December): finer control of Apple’s own apps. Think tidying your Safari tabs, sorting folders in Files, undoing an iMessage you already sent, or rotating, cropping and enhancing a photo before you share it.
• Next spring: actions inside third-party apps. The examples given in the report include ordering food through Grubhub or booking a table on OpenTable. Developers can test their integrations now, and App Store submissions are scheduled to open in spring 2027.
• Later, maybe 2027: a more independent, agent-style Siri that handles ongoing tasks, if Gurman’s read is right.

So if you are waiting for Siri to run errands for you, the honest answer is that the first two steps are close and the third is still a hope, not a product.

Ternus reportedly wants Apple to treat AI with the same urgency as its competitors and to go beyond simply fixing Siri. According to the report, he is frustrated by what he sees as a reluctance inside the software group to move fast.

Federighi has been Apple’s AI czar since the company pushed out its former AI chief last year. He is credited with getting the revamped Siri out the door after an embarrassing two-year delay. But he is also described as more wary of AI, raising questions about privacy, security and its wider effects, and as a very hands-on manager. Some employees reportedly feel that style leaves little room for other ideas, and that they have limited say over where products go.

There is a planning gap too. Federighi reportedly works on a horizon of 12 to 18 months, while Apple’s hardware teams plan years ahead. There is no sign he is leaving, and the report says he has put little effort into a succession plan. Separately, Mike Rockwell, the Vision Pro creator who now runs Siri engineering as a vice president, is still seriously weighing whether to step back next year, either from that job or from Apple entirely. Losing him would hurt, given his role in shipping the new Siri.

Apple has also reportedly changed the way it develops iOS 28, macOS 28 and the matching updates. Each year’s software is built in three big stages. Normally, each stage is split evenly: four weeks of writing code, then four weeks of convergence, the phase where new features are stitched into the operating system.

For the first stage of iOS 28, that split became six weeks of coding and exploring and only two weeks of convergence. That is 50% more time to build, and the report links it to coding agents getting better at helping engineers. Staff reportedly like it because it gives them room to try ideas before they have to lock things down. No specific iOS 28 features have been reported yet. The usual pattern would put a beta in June and the public release in September next year.

For most people, nothing changes today. The next visible step is iOS 27.3, so keep your iPhone updated and watch for Siri being able to handle more inside Photos, Safari, Files and Messages.

The bigger shift deserves some thought before it lands. An assistant that acts on its own needs wide access to your email, messages and apps, and it may make choices while you’re not looking. Ternus addressed this on Apple’s November 2 earnings call. He called agents promising and said Siri’s new orchestrator-based design gives Apple room to grow, while stressing that people must understand what access they are granting and that privacy and security have to be protected. Apple’s existing App Intents framework, which lets developers teach Siri actions inside their apps, is the plumbing any agent would build on.

Giving an assistant freedom to decide when to act raises a different set of privacy and security questions than today’s ask-and-answer Siri, and that is likely to shape how far Apple lets it go. The first test arrives when developers can submit their Siri app actions to the App Store next spring.