Apple reportedly racing to turn Siri into an agent that controls third-party apps

What the report says

Apple is pushing to reshape Siri from a voice assistant that answers single commands into an AI agent that can carry out multi-step tasks across apps, according to The Verge, citing a report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.

The pressure reportedly starts at the top. Gurman says Apple CEO John Ternus is pressing Craig Federighi, the executive in charge of Apple's AI work, to compress the Siri roadmap and deliver an agent capable of standing up to OpenAI's Dots or Meta's Muse. Federighi's team has reportedly shipped a functional version of Siri AI on a very tight timeline, but according to the report the company recognizes it is not keeping pace with its competitors.

Two upgrades are on the way

The report points to two significant improvements landing over the coming months.

The first gives Siri precise control over Apple's own apps. Concrete examples include rotating and cropping images in Photos and organizing tabs in Safari, capabilities that are expected to arrive alongside iOS 27.3.

The second, and larger, change is integration with third-party apps, which Gurman expects to arrive later, in the spring. That would allow Siri to do things like place a Grubhub order or book a dinner reservation through OpenTable, rather than merely opening an app and leaving the user to finish the job.

From one-off commands to ongoing goals

App control is only part of the picture. Apple reportedly wants Siri to handle ongoing tasks instead of isolated requests. Gurman notes that rival assistants — Dots, Muse and Grok — can already track a goal, work out what needs to happen next, and keep pursuing an objective without the user triggering every individual step. Apple wants to move in the same direction, and Gurman believes Siri could become meaningfully more agentic as early as next year, though he adds that the company has little choice given current consumer and market demands.

Why it matters

The line between an assistant and an agent is fast becoming the dividing line in consumer AI. Assistants respond to one request at a time; agents hold a plan across many steps, apps and stretches of time. If Apple delivers this roadmap, Siri moves from setting timers and answering questions to acting on the user's behalf — ordering food, booking tables, editing photos and sorting browser tabs without hand-holding.

The urgency is competitive. OpenAI's Dots, Meta's Muse and Grok are the yardsticks Apple is being measured against, and by Gurman's account Apple knows it is behind. Of the two upcoming upgrades, third-party app integration is the one that matters most, because it is what turns a voice assistant into infrastructure for everyday tasks. It also implies developers will need to expose their apps' actions to Siri in some form, raising questions about permissions, privacy and adoption that Apple will have to answer. How those questions are resolved will help decide whether an agentic Siri becomes a daily habit or another feature that arrives late.