Siri AI could come with a paywall for power users

In his final earnings call as CEO of Apple, Tim Cook said that the company’s long-awaited Siri AI upgrade could come with some paywalled limits. While Cook conceded that these plans are not set in stone, he envisions users being able to buy more compute for Siri AI via its existing iCloud+ subscriptions, which offer extended cloud storage.

“We do believe there will be people that want to use [Siri AI] a lot, and so we will have some kind of upgrade possibilities on iCloud+, where people can buy up the stack on iCloud+, and we’ll see how the pickup for that is,” Cook said on Thursday. “But we could not be more excited about where [Siri AI] is.”

Most other AI providers like Anthropic and OpenAI operate similarly, offering a limited free version to consumers with the option of upgrading to support more usage.

The new-and-improved Siri AI is available in the iOS 27 beta, and is planned to roll out more broadly this fall.

As longtime Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering John Ternus steps into Tim Cook’s shoes, he will take the helm at a critical time for the company. Apple has fallen behind in its efforts to build an advanced AI assistant, even capitulating to its direct competitor Google by licensing a custom Gemini model to augment Siri. The Siri AI overhaul was so delayed that Apple had to pay $250 million to settle a class action lawsuit over how it marketed the iPhone 16’s AI capabilities.

Apple, like every other hardware manufacturer, is staring down a rocky road for accessing the supplies it needs to meet customer demand. Due to the AI-driven RAM shortage across the industry, it’s more expensive to build hardware, which has led companies like Meta , Samsung , Microsoft , and Sony to raise prices of some devices. Apple raised the price of Macs and iPads last month, but has yet to adjust the price of its existing iPhone models.

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Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of technology and culture. She has also written for publications like Polygon, MTV, the Kenyon Review, NPR, and Business Insider. She is the co-host of Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture, with science fiction author Isabel J. Kim. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she worked as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and film festival coordinator. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Princeton in Asia Fellow in Laos.

You can contact or verify outreach from Amanda by emailing amanda@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at @amanda.100 on Signal.

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