Four months after Apple introduced Siri AI, its rebuilt assistant, the feature has still not arrived on iPhones and iPads in the European Union. On 19 October, heise online’s “KI-Update kompakt” AI digest, compiled by Isabel Grünewald, noted that Apple has not yet brought the chatbot to the EU, for regulatory reasons. The item gives no launch date. The most recent statement on timing from Apple that we could find dates from June, when it said it had none.
Behind the delay is a dispute over who is responsible. Apple says the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the EU law that imposes extra duties on dominant “gatekeeper” platforms, leaves it no safe way to launch. The European Commission says the choice is Apple’s alone.
What EU users have, and what they lack
Apple Intelligence is the company’s umbrella name for its AI features. In February 2025, Apple announced that iPhone and iPad users in the EU would get Apple Intelligence for the first time with iOS 18.4 in April, adding French, German, Italian and Spanish, among other languages. Apple’s notes from November 2025 listed further European languages, including Danish, Dutch and Swedish, but at that point described Apple Intelligence as a beta and warned that some features were not available in every region. The sources do not show whether that has changed since.
Siri AI is a separate matter. When it was unveiled on 8 June 2026, Apple said EU users would not get it with iOS 27 or iPadOS 27, nor on Apple Watch, which needs a paired iPhone running it. The missing features include a dedicated app for past conversations, expanded Visual Intelligence and built-in writing tools. Apple said EU users would be able to use Siri AI on macOS 27 and visionOS 27, the software for Macs and the Vision Pro headset, although the sources do not confirm it has shipped there. EU-based developers, it said, would not be able to test or use Siri AI for their apps on iOS 27, iPadOS 27 and watchOS 27.
The global timetable is murkier. In June, Silicon UK reported that the assistant, which uses Google’s AI technology, would enter user beta testing only in September. The German site Borncity instead described a public beta from July and a full rollout planned for autumn.
An 18-month period, two stories
Apple’s account is that, under the Commission’s reading of the DMA, it would have to give any AI assistant near-total access to a phone, including reading and sending messages, making purchases and acting across apps, from the day Siri AI launched. It says it proposed an intermediary called Trusted System Agent so that rival assistants could reach the same capabilities safely, and offered to launch Siri AI while phasing this in over 18 months. The Commission, it says, rejected every proposal. Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, said regulators’ “refusal to engage constructively on solutions that preserve privacy and security means we do not currently have a timeline” for Siri AI on iPhone and iPad in the EU.
The Commission tells it differently. As Matthew Broersma reported for Silicon UK, spokesman Thomas Regnier said Apple had asked to be exempted from its interoperability obligations for at least 18 months and had not offered solutions meeting EU privacy and security standards. “The decision not to roll out Siri AI in the EU is Apple’s and Apple’s only,” he said. The Commission also argued, according to the same report, that nothing in the DMA prevents companies from introducing new products.
The question of access cuts both ways. At a briefing in Cupertino, Apple executives told reporters that the new Siri would have unusually broad access to personal data on the device, including nearly all communications, according to Reuters as cited by Silicon UK. Apple says that data is protected because Siri AI uses on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, which it presents as extending the iPhone’s security into the cloud, even though the assistant relies on Google’s AI technology. Its argument is that the same safeguards could not be guaranteed if rival assistants received similar access.
Both sides, then, refer to an 18-month period: Apple as a gradual rollout of a safeguard, the Commission as a request for an exemption. The material available to us contains no text of either proposal: there is only Apple’s own outline and the Commission’s characterisation of it, so whether both describe the same plan cannot be confirmed.
A pattern, its critics and what comes next
This is not the first such delay. Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac reported in September 2025 that Apple, in a submission to the Commission’s DMA review, cited iPhone Mirroring, Live Translation on AirPods and two Maps location features as held back over privacy concerns, expected more delays and wanted the law repealed or substantially revised. Live Translation then reached the EU in November 2025 after extra engineering work, which shows at least one such delay was later resolved.
Critics of Apple point to its wider record under the same law. In a report published in April, before Siri AI was unveiled, the Free Software Foundation Europe, an advocacy group, looked at developers’ interoperability requests in general. It says that none of 56 formal requests made to Apple since May 2025 had produced a new solution by 22 March 2026. By the FSFE’s count, based on Apple’s public tracker, 43 of them had been closed, 27 confidentially; of the 16 public closures, none produced a new solution and 10 were refused on technical grounds. The report does not concern Siri or voice assistants specifically.
Elsewhere, Apple is also rolling out in stages: citing Bloomberg, heise reports that Apple Intelligence is due in China in December with iOS 27.3, but without Siri AI. In Europe, the open question is whether Apple and the Commission move from their June positions, and whether Apple will set a date at all.
