Apple opened WWDC 2026 on Monday by announcing that its revamped Apple Intelligence runs on Apple Foundation Models co-developed with Google using the technology behind the Gemini family.
The arrangement is narrower than the headline suggests. Apple says Google's models were used to build its own foundation models, not to serve requests; inference still happens on-device or through Private Cloud Compute, and Apple says outside experts can verify its privacy guarantees "at any time." A new system orchestrator sits at the centre, routing features based on the active app and the user's current task, with image generation, advanced photo editing and visual question answering among the new capabilities.
It is a notable concession for a company that has marketed itself as the anti-Google on privacy, and it leans on a rival's research to close a capability gap that two years of in-house effort had not. Whether users read "built with Gemini" as reassurance or as the deal with the devil that the WWDC forums were already calling it is the open question.