The European Commission rejected every compliance proposal Apple offered, including a request for an 18-month exemption from interoperability rules
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Apple $AAPL announced Monday that Siri AI, its rebuilt voice assistant, will not be available to iPhone or iPad users in the European Union when iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 launch later this year, after E.U. regulators rejected every proposal Apple put forward to bring the feature to Europe.
The standoff centers on the Digital Markets Act, the E.U. law that requires major tech platforms to give rivals equal access to their systems. At the center of Apple's complaint is its contention that Brussels' reading of the DMA would mandate that any competing voice assistant receive the same deep system-level permissions as Siri AI — permissions that would encompass messaging, purchases, file access, and cross-app actions — with none of the privacy and security guardrails the company considers indispensable. To bridge the gap, Apple put forward a proposal called Trusted System Agent — a go-between layer intended to give rival assistants comparable access to Siri AI's capabilities — paired with a plan to phase in that solution across an 18-month window. The Commission rejected that plan along with all other proposals Apple submitted, the company said.
Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier pushed back sharply on Apple's framing when he spoke to reporters in Brussels on Tuesday. Ownership of the decision rested entirely with Apple, he said, quoting directly: "The decision not to roll out Siri AI in the E.U. is Apple's and Apple's only" — and he stressed that the DMA contains no provision barring the company from releasing new products within the bloc. What Apple actually did, Regnier argued, was skip the work of building a compliant system altogether and instead ask regulators to excuse the company from its interoperability duties for at least a year and a half. "That's not an option," he said, according to The Associated Press.
Apple Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi said in a statement that the Commission's "refusal to engage constructively on solutions that preserve privacy and security means we do not currently have a timeline for Siri AI's availability on iOS and iPadOS in the E.U."
Within the E.U., Siri AI will be accessible on macOS 27 and visionOS 27, but Apple Watch owners in the region will find themselves without it as well — the wearable depends on a connected iPhone to run the feature, and that iPhone support is precisely what is being withheld. App developers working within the E.U. will face the same restriction, leaving them unable to integrate or evaluate Siri AI functionality in their iPhone and iPad software.
Siri AI launched at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, powered by Google $GOOGL Gemini. The revamped assistant taps into a user's messages, emails, and photo library for personal context, takes actions within and across apps, and can respond to questions grounded in whatever is currently on screen. The standoff follows a pattern established with Apple's earlier AI rollout: when Apple Intelligence first debuted in the United States in October 2024, European iPhone users were excluded from the start, and it took until iOS 18.4 in April 2025 — months of back-and-forth with regulators — before those capabilities reached the E.U., according to The Next Web. Apple said it hopes to eventually bring Siri AI to the E.U. and will continue engaging with regulators, but offered no timeline. Europe accounted for nearly 27% of Apple's total sales in its last fiscal year, according to Reuters.
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