Apple's new Siri AI will be late in the EU and China

Apple's new Siri AI will, once again, be a little late, especially in some regions.

The company originally announced that a new, smarter Siri would return in 2024. It took two years for those vague promises to take the form of Siri AI, which the company announced during the WWDC 2026 keynote.

Alas, Siri still won't be equally distributed at launch. According to Apple's SVP of engineering, Craig Federighi, Siri AI in beta is now available to developers, and it's coming to end users "this fall."

But not for users in the European Union and China. In both cases, Siri AI will be available at an undefined time in the future, as Apple works through regulatory hurdles. This isn't a huge surprise, given that Apple Intelligence was initially unavailable in these regions, but it's still a disappointment to millions of Apple users.

Apple explained the issues in a blog post published on Monday.

"Unfortunately, due to the Digital Markets Act (DMA), Apple will not be able to ship Siri AI in the European Union with the release of iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. Over the past several months, EU regulators did not accept any of Apple’s proposed solutions to bring Siri AI to the EU while safely supporting other virtual assistants," the company wrote.

The issue, it seems, is not so much with Siri itself, but with other virtual assistants, which don't get the same playing ground as Siri. "Under EU regulators’ extreme interpretation of the DMA, Apple would have to give any virtual assistant direct access to users’ private data — and the ability to directly control other installed applications," wrote Apple.

Apple says it did figure out a solution. Called the Trusted System Agent, it's an "intermediary that would allow virtual assistants to safely access the same features and capabilities as Siri AI for devices in the EU." The plan was to gradually release Siri in the EU over an (ouch) 18-month period. But once again, according to Apple, "the European Commission did not agree to any of Apple’s proposals."

The bad news is that, according to Apple, "there is currently no timeline for Siri AI’s availability in the EU on iOS and iPadOS."

Not great, but we're hoping for a solution, and we bet Apple is, too.

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