Siri AI will not get real chatbots until Apple can secure them

John Ternus has said that Apple wants Siri AI to offer agentic AI tools, but not until it can be sure users truly understand what the risks are.

The world's first real exposure to AI came with OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGPT. When many other firms then released their own chatbots, Apple was regarded as being behind on AI because it didn't have one.

Today AI, at least for the aficionados Apple's Greg Joswiak calls the "lunatic fringe," technology has moved on. Agentic AI is arguably the buzzword now, with AI tools able to take action on users' computers to, for instance, send messages or build apps.

Apple still has neither an AI agent nor a chatbot, or at least not for consumers, and John Ternus believes that's right. Speaking on Apple's latest earnings call he denied that Apple was against AI agents.

"As far as agentic capabilities, you know, we think these are promising tools for users," he said. "We just want to make sure that users are aware of what they're giving access to."

"We want to make sure this is done in a way that protects security and privacy," he continued.

Siri AI is not agentic, is not a chatbot

Siri AI is much better at many things than its Siri predecessor, including the ability to have a kind of conversation with it. But Apple believes that remembering context does not make Siri AI into a chatbot, and that it shouldn't.

"If you use many of the existing chatbots, they're really focused on engagement to a large degree, and sycophancy, right? They kind of want to pull you in," Apple's Craig Federighi said in June 2026. "They might encourage you to reveal things about yourself and then use that as a basis to establish a connection."

"The way that we have designed Siri," he continued, "Siri really wants to say, 'Listen, that's not what I'm here for, I'm here to help you.' [If] you try to engage Siri as a romantic partner, Siri's not into that."

So while others may call Siri AI a chatbot and it is much more of one in this new version than it was before, Apple doesn't see it that way. Now based on Ternus's few remarks during the earnings call, it seems clear that Apple is approaching agentic AI with the same specific aim.

Users come first

Apple appears to believe that users should not have to regard Siri AI as a chatbot, they should just know what it can do for them when they ask. Similarly, Apple believes that users shouldn't have to worry about AI agents.

Right now there is plenty to worry about and it concerns what Ternus said about access. Users aren't always told, or just don't always know, exactly what they are risking giving up when they use today's agents.

"With Siri AI, we really have the kind of the Siri that we always wanted," said Ternus during the earnings call. "It's primarily request-based today, but as we talked about at WWDC, it's built on a modern orchestrated-driven architecture that gives us real room to expand its capabilities over time."

"So, you know, we're pushing really hard on [privacy and security] with Siri AI," he continued.

Apple already has the most private of all the AI services, and that's increasingly becoming a selling point of its devices. If it can find a way to give users agentic tools that remain private, Apple could cement its place as where users don't have to think or worry about AI.

It could cement its place as where users only need to know what their devices can do for them, not whether something is an AI feature or not.

Apple definitely sees AI and its hardware as forever connected, too. "[We're] also really encouraged the fact that Apple devices, we think, are the best places to use all forms of AI," concluded Ternus.

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