Apple's public-facing satisfaction with the Siri AI launch obscures internal pressures and tensions.

Apple’s recently appointed CEO, John Ternus, is allegedly pushing the company internally to ramp up its AI strategy — including making Siri an AI agent.

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the CEO is publicly pleased with the Siri AI launch, but privately encouraging Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of software engineering, to move faster.

“Desiring more and frustrated by what he sees as a reluctance to embrace AI with the same urgency as competitors, Ternus pushed his software chief to accelerate the company’s road map and move quickly beyond merely making necessary improvements to Siri,” Gurman wrote. He added that the tension stems from Federighi’s reputation as an AI skeptic.

The revamped Siri AI is now a much better voice assistant with some helpful features. Gurman noted he thinks Siri AI’s ability to automatically fix your weak passwords is already somewhat agentic behavior, though AI-generated passwords have their own issues.

But Siri AI isn’t yet on par with increasingly autonomous agents from AI-first companies that aim to proactively organize your tasks, use your computer, and write advanced code. Still, those rival agents deliver a patchwork of capabilities: while some, like OpenClaw and Anthropic’s Claude Code, are highly functional, others, like Google’s Gemini Spark, aren’t quite there yet.

Also: I tried replacing Claude Code with a free local AI stack

Regardless, the issue here is time. Despite developing powerful hardware perfectly suited for running local AI models, Apple has remained slower than competitors on the AI software front.

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