Apple vs. OpenAI: How Siri AI Stacks Up Against the New ChatGPT
Bloomberg ● Covered by 2 sources
Apple's revamped Siri lands this fall in iOS 26, and it's basically an AI chatbot now. It'll instantly be the most widely distributed AI assistant on Earth, but ChatGPT still wins on brains.
Apple is finally giving Siri the upgrade people have been begging for since ChatGPT showed up and made voice assistants look ancient. The new version arrives this fall bundled into iOS, which means it lands on every iPhone capable of running the update. No download required, no account setup, no asking grandma to install anything. That distribution alone makes it the biggest AI chatbot rollout in history, overnight, just by virtue of Apple's install base.
Where the new Siri actually shines is in the boring-but-useful stuff. It can read what's on your screen and act on it, adjust device settings without you digging through menus, and generally behave like a smarter version of the assistant Apple has offered for over a decade. That's the lane Apple has always played in: tight integration with the hardware and OS, not necessarily the smartest conversation in the room.
And that's the catch. ChatGPT still runs circles around Siri when it comes to actually talking, reasoning through multi-step tasks, or plugging into other apps and services. OpenAI has spent years building out productivity features, plugins, and a chatbot that can hold a real conversation rather than just execute commands. Siri, even reworked, is playing catch-up on the conversational side.
So the comparison isn't really Siri versus ChatGPT in a head-to-head sense. It's more that Apple is finally shipping a baseline AI experience to a billion-plus devices, while OpenAI keeps pushing the ceiling on what a chatbot can actually do. Different games, same fall release window, and a lot of people about to notice the gap for the first time.
My take
Reach isn't the same as being good, and Apple knows it can win on distribution while still losing on capability — that's been the Siri playbook for years. The real story here is that most iPhone users will get their first taste of a genuinely conversational AI assistant through Apple's watered-down version, not OpenAI's, and that shapes expectations for the whole category whether it deserves to or not.
Read more about this at: Bloomberg