Apple is racing to make Siri more agentic

Future versions of Siri will be able to control third-party apps and perform more complex tasks.

Future versions of Siri will be able to control third-party apps and perform more complex tasks.

by Terrence O'Brien

Nov 8, 2026, 7:18 PM UTC

Photo: David Imel / The Verge

is the Verge’s weekend editor. He’s covered the tech industry for over 18 years and knows a thing or two about synths.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says CEO John Ternus is pressuring AI czar Craig Federighi to accelerate the Siri roadmap and deliver a powerful AI agent that can compete with OpenAI’s Dots or Meta’s Muse. While Federighi has delivered a functional version of Siri AI on an incredibly short timeline, the company has no illusions that it’s keeping pace with its rivals.

Two significant improvements are expected to be made to Siri in the coming months. One will give the assistant fine-grained control over Apple’s first-party apps, allowing it to do things like rotate and crop images in Photos and organize Safari tabs. Those capabilities are expected to land with iOS 27.3. The bigger change, integration with third-party apps, is likely to land later, in the Spring, according to Gurman. That would let Siri place an order through Grubhub or book a dinner reservation through OpenTable, for example.

But that’s just the start. Apple is expected to push Siri to become more agentic and enable features that will allow it to perform ongoing tasks, not just one-offs. Gurman says:

Dots, Muse and Grok can keep track of goals, determine what needs to happen next and continue pursuing objectives without the user initiating every individual step. Apple ultimately wants to go in this direction, I’m told, and I believe the company could make Siri more like an agent as early as next year — not that it has much of a choice, given current consumer and market demands.

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