Apple is set to make a major move into the AI search space with the launch of World Knowledge Answers, an AI-driven answer engine that will debut next year, Bloomberg reported. The service will be integrated with Siri at first, allowing users to receive comprehensive responses, and could later expand to Safari and Spotlight. This marks Apple’s most significant step yet into AI-enabled search and information retrieval. “The work we’ve done on this end-to-end revamp of Siri has given us the results we needed,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software engineering, during a recent company-wide meeting.
The initiative is part of a broader overhaul of Siri, internally codenamed Linwood and LLM Siri, designed to transform the assistant into a more intelligent, conversational tool. The updated system will be able to summarize web results using text, images, videos, and even local data, creating a richer and more interactive experience for users.
Apple is taking a hybrid approach to powering this capability, testing external AI models such as Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude alongside its own Apple Foundation Models, which are optimized for on-device processing to preserve user privacy. Bloomberg reports that Apple has favored Google’s model for summarization tasks after Anthropic reportedly asked for over $1.5 billion annually to license its technology.
This move comes as Apple maintains its $20 billion-a-year search deal with Google, which recently received a green light from a US judge to continue with only minor modifications. However, Apple’s services chief Eddy Cue revealed that Google searches originating from Apple devices have fallen for the first time in 20 years, signaling a shift in user behavior amid the rise of AI-first search competitors like Perplexity AI.
While Apple explored acquiring Perplexity and Mistral AI to accelerate its efforts, it ultimately chose to build its own answer engine in-house. Still, Apple’s AI push has faced challenges, including talent attrition from its Foundation Models team, with key figures such as founder Ruoming Pang moving to competitors like Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
The launch of World Knowledge Answers is expected to position Apple as a formidable player in the AI search space, deepening its control over the user experience while reducing reliance on third-party search engines.
