Wednesday, June 10, 2026

No Siri AI in EU

Unfortunately, due to the Digital Markets Act (DMA), Apple will not be able to ship Siri AI in the European Union with the release of iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. Over the past several months, EU regulators did not accept any of Apple’s proposed solutions to bring Siri AI to the EU while safely supporting other virtual assistants.

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EU users will be able to access Siri AI on macOS 27 and visionOS 27. Developers located in the EU will not be able to test or use the new Siri AI features for their apps on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and watchOS 27.

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According to EU regulators, the DMA requires Apple to give any AI system nearly unlimited access to a user’s device, as well as the ability to act on that access autonomously without a user’s ongoing visibility and control.

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Apple designed a solution called Trusted System Agent — an intermediary that would allow virtual assistants to safely access the same features and capabilities as Siri AI for devices in the EU. Apple also shared a plan to launch Siri AI in the EU while gradually rolling out this new solution over an 18-month period. The European Commission said no. In fact, the European Commission did not agree to any of Apple’s proposals.

This phrasing is not very clear, perhaps intentionally so. Apple is trying to give the impression that it did all this extra work to meet the DMA’s requirements, and yet the EC rejected its proposals, so it’s their fault Siri AI isn’t shipping in the EU. But it looks like the crux is that the Trusted System Agent is currently vaporware. What the EC rejected is that Apple wanted to be able to ship Siri AI now on the promise of future openness. The TSA would actually be built during this 18-month window of exclusivity. It’s not surprising that the EU would reject that proposal. The App Store doesn’t approve apps that flout the guidelines but promise to comply later. It doesn’t even entertain proposals of the form, “If I built this would it be approved?”

European Commission (via Steve Troughton-Smith):

So first, the decision not to roll out Siri AI in the EU is Apple’s and Apple’s only.

Because absolutely nothing in the DMA prohibits Apple from introducing new products in the EU.

What Apple is however not allowed to do, just like any other gatekeeper, is to close the market.

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Apple simply made a request to the European Commission to be exempted from their interoperability obligations under the DA.

And this for at least 18 months on top of it. Guess what? That’s not an option.

Reuters (Hacker News):

Apple said it detailed its plans for Siri AI to EU regulators six months ago, along with a technical proposal to allow secure third-party access to that data.

“In essence, a commission that’s asking us to conduct a very risky experiment on many, many, many tens of millions of users,” Greg Joswiak, Apple’s marketing chief, told reporters, “and we only want to ship these capabilities when we can do so safely.”

The EU said not to ship it without the TSA, yet Joswiak spins this as the EU asking Apple to be reckless? And if Apple wanted to ship them safely, why did it stop working on them?

William Gallagher:

Apple spoke of having spent hundreds of thousands of engineering hours on changes to comply with the EU. In the new report, though, Apple now says that it no longer knows what to work on.

So currently none of its engineers are working on adapting Siri AI to meet the EU’s demands.

It seems like Apple isn’t taking this very seriously. They’re more interested in trying to score PR points by blaming the delay on the EC rather than on building something compliant. So I guess the EC was prescient not to grant an exemption based on the promise that they’d follow through with the TSA.

Kyle Howells:

However, do I think Apple should be made to open up that level of system access?

Honestly yes. They are worried about protecting my data. But it’s MINE. Me, the user.

Stick a big privacy prompt, maybe a system settings screen and reboot, but I want access to my data!

We can look to BrowserEngineKit to see how well it works out to introduce a trusted intermediate layer that Apple doesn’t itself rely on. And this seems like a much harder problem.

Kyle Howells:

Yeah, that privacy layer is a stupid [non] starter. “Find the place my friend said we should go swimming and give me directions”

The only way that query can work with an intermediary layer is if the AI asks that layer to do the searching for them and only gets the response back.

Except that basically kills the advantage of LLM agents & instead delegate all the ‘smart’ parts to some dumb on device model Apple makes.

Previously: