Apple Accelerates Siri Development to Build Autonomous AI Agent Rivaling Dots and Muse
Apple is advancing Siri toward autonomous agent capabilities, preparing deep first-party and third-party app controls to compete with OpenAI's Dots and Meta's Muse.
Apple is intensifying internal efforts to expand Siri's capabilities, aiming to transform the voice assistant into a comprehensive AI agent capable of managing complex, autonomous workflows. According to reporting from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple CEO John Ternus has placed pressure on software leader Craig Federighi to accelerate Siri's development roadmap. The internal push comes as Apple recognizes the necessity of closing the competitive gap between its assistant and emerging systems developed by rivals, including OpenAI’s Dots and Meta’s Muse.
While Federighi previously oversaw the delivery of a working version of Siri's updated AI system within a compressed timeframe, Apple acknowledges that the platform still lags behind the state of the art. To catch up, the company is preparing a series of strategic software updates designed to steadily grant Siri deeper operational authority over both system-level features and external applications.
Roadmap for App Control and System Integration
The initial wave of functionality will focus on native device software. Gurman reports that Siri will first gain fine-grained management of Apple's first-party applications, a release targeted for iOS 27.3. This update will allow the assistant to manipulate specific application features directly, enabling actions such as cropping and rotating images within the Photos app or organizing open tabs inside Safari.
A subsequent and broader expansion is scheduled to arrive in the spring, focusing on third-party application integration. Once deployed, Siri will be able to navigate and trigger actions within non-Apple services. Gurman notes that this will enable practical automated actions, such as scheduling a restaurant reservation via OpenTable or placing a meal order through Grubhub.
Shifting from Simple Commands to Autonomous Agents
Granting Siri the capacity to perform single, isolated in-app functions represents only an intermediate phase of Apple's strategy. According to Gurman, the long-term plan is to make Siri genuinely agentic, enabling the assistant to oversee extended, multi-step tasks rather than merely executing one-off instructions.
Modern agentic platforms like OpenAI's Dots, Meta's Muse, and Grok differentiate themselves by maintaining persistent awareness of user goals. Instead of requiring step-by-step human prompts, these systems evaluate what actions need to occur next and work iteratively toward completing an objective. Gurman reports that Apple is determined to move Siri in this direction, suggesting that more autonomous agent capabilities could arrive as early as next year to align with industry expectations.
What it means for developers
Apple's planned rollout points to a major shift in how mobile software interacts with operating systems. With third-party app controls slated for the spring, developers will need to prepare their applications for assistant-driven interaction. Platforms that rely on user actions like ordering, scheduling, or content navigation—similar to Grubhub and OpenTable—will increasingly interact with users mediated by AI rather than solely through graphical interfaces.
Engineers will need to ensure that their software exposes clear programmatic entry points so Siri can reliably interpret and execute actions. For teams designing autonomous products and evaluating how frontier reasoning handles user requests, developers can try top AI models cheaply through one API at https://apixoai.online to explore how models like Grok approach goal tracking and task execution.
As the industry transitions from basic query-and-response interfaces toward proactive agents that pursue multi-step goals, developers will need to account for autonomous assistants managing core app flows. Preparing application logic for agentic integration will likely become a key operational requirement across the iOS ecosystem.
Source: Apple is racing to make Siri more agentic — The Verge AI. Written by the Apixo team from that report.
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