Will Google train its AI on your Siri data? Apple breaks silence after Gemini partnership

Google, by default, uses conversations users have with Gemini to train its AI models. With Gemini now powering the revamped Siri, the logical next question is whether Google gets access to your personal Siri conversations. It turns out Apple anticipated this question and has already issued a clarification.

The Cupertino based tech giant, in a joint statement, said that while its upcoming Apple Intelligence features will be powered by Gemini, they will still adhere to the company’s ‘industry-leading privacy standards’. The company also noted that the features would run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute.

In case you aren’t aware, Private Cloud Compute is Apple’s own cloud intelligence system that it announced with iOS 18 to run Apple Intelligence features on the cloud while offering the same level of privacy and security as when the data is stored on the iPhone.

When a user uses an Apple Intelligence feature, Apple’s AI analyses whether it can process the data on-device or if it needs more computational power. If it needs more computational capacity, the AI sends only the data that is relevant to the task to Apple silicon servers, and the company claims that the “data is not stored or made accessible to Apple, and is only used to fulfil the user’s requests.”

Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, had explained the system while introducing it alongside iOS 18, saying, “Private Cloud Compute uses your data only to fulfil your request, and never stores it, making sure it’s never accessible to anyone, including Apple. And we’ve designed the system so that independent experts can verify these protections.”

While Apple has not yet gone into detail about how this specific partnership will work, the general idea is that these models should use the computing power on your phone to run smaller tasks, while more complex tasks could be routed via Private Cloud Compute. This way, while Google would be providing the actual brainpower behind the tasks, it would not be able to access the data Apple users share with Siri.

Apple had earlier partnered with OpenAI to power complex queries in Siri along with some Apple Intelligence features. The company had then said that “privacy protections are built in when accessing ChatGPT within Siri,” which included OpenAI not being able to save user requests and user IP addresses being obscured.

In any case, the first time we see Google’s AI in action on the iPhone will be with the Siri revamp, which is tipped to arrive with the iOS 26.4 update in March or April.