Siri AI could stay off EU iPhones for five months or more, Bloomberg's Gurman saysSiri AI could stay off EU iPhones for five months or more, Bloomberg's Gurman says

Siri AI could remain unavailable on iPhone and iPad in the European Union for at least another five months, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.

Gurman gave the estimate in his Power On newsletter of 4 October, which MacRumors reported on 5 October. He described a delay of around five months as the best case, and said the wait could run longer while Apple negotiates over the bloc's digital rules. Bloomberg's page was not available to us, so this account rests on MacRumors' summary of it. It is one journalist's estimate, not a date from Apple, and the summary does not say whether the five months run from Siri AI's September launch or from now.

Gurman also offered a reading of Apple's motives: that it is holding Siri AI back to put pressure on the European Commission, in the hope that frustrated customers push Brussels to change its approach. He compared the situation with the delayed EU launch of Apple Intelligence. Apple has said nothing new about timing.

Where Siri AI works in the EU today

Apple's own pages draw the line by platform. A support document published with the Apple Watch Series 12 says Siri AI will not initially be available in the EU on iOS, iPadOS and watchOS. macOS is not on that list, and MacRumors confirms that EU users can use Siri AI on a Mac. Apple's Apple Intelligence page says the other new features across apps, such as the photo editing tools, the new Image Playground and the intelligent features in Safari, are available to EU users on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro.

Siri AI's language support has moved on without the EU. When the iOS 27.2 beta added French, Spanish and Portuguese to Siri AI, France, Spain and Portugal, the home countries of three of the five, were among the places it still could not be used on a phone.

How the dispute started

Apple announced on 8 June that Siri AI would not launch in the EU on iPhone and iPad. Craig Federighi said Apple was deeply disappointed, and the company said regulators had rejected its proposals, among them a Trusted System Agent that would have let third-party assistants reach the same device capabilities as Siri AI. The Commission replied the next day. Its spokesperson Thomas Regnier said the decision was "Apple's and Apple's only", and that Apple had asked to be exempted from its interoperability obligations under the Digital Markets Act, which he said was not an option.

On 30 June Tim Cook, then Apple's chief executive, met the EU's tech chief Henna Virkkunen. The Financial Times reported the talks, and a Commission spokesperson called them a constructive exchange on which work continues. No outcome has been announced since.

When could EU iPhone owners get Siri AI?

The closest precedent is Apple Intelligence itself. Apple withheld it from iPhone and iPad in the EU when it launched in English in October 2024, and its newsroom announced on 31 March 2025 that iPhone and iPad users in the EU had access to it for the first time. That gap was about five months.

Nothing in Gurman's estimate points to Siri AI on an EU iPhone this year. Counted from the September launch, five months is February 2027; counted from now, March.

Our take

Gurman's best case is, almost to the month, the gap Apple Intelligence took last time, which suggests a forecast built on precedent rather than on anything said across a negotiating table. We would treat it that way. The two disputes are not the same, either. This one is narrow and specific: whether a rival assistant gets the same reach into the phone as Siri. Apple's answer was rejected, the Commission says Apple asked for an exemption instead, and neither side has said in public that it has moved.

On motive, Gurman's reading that Apple is using customer frustration as leverage is his interpretation, not a reported fact. It does fit a company that has held 257 meetings with EU policymakers since mid-2024, second only to Google. But leverage has a cost Apple carries too. Every month Siri AI is missing from EU iPhones is a month in which Europeans learn to use someone else's assistant.

The Mac exception is the detail APPDOOK finds most telling. The Commission designated iOS as a gatekeeper platform in September 2023 and iPadOS in April 2024, and macOS is not among Apple's designated services. Siri AI runs in the EU exactly where the interoperability obligation does not reach. watchOS is not designated either, but an Apple Watch leans on its iPhone, which is the likeliest reason it is on the excluded list.

For anyone in the EU buying an iPhone this autumn, Siri AI should not be part of the reason. For developers, the thread worth following is the interoperability one. If Apple eventually ships a version that rival assistants can plug into, the iOS 27 code hinting that Siri could hand requests to other models starts to look like groundwork rather than curiosity.