Bloomberg: Apple targets iOS 26.4 for long-delayed Siri AI upgrade

This morning, we noted that in a new interview, Apple’s Greg ”Joz” Joswiak confirmed that the new AI Siri upgrade would arrive in 2026. Now, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is out with a new report offering more details on the delay, including Apple’s internal timeline.

According to the report, Apple plans to ship the upgraded Siri experience as part of iOS 26.4, an update typically released in March.

The revamped Siri is slated to integrate more deeply with user data and on-screen content, allowing it to perform more contextual, multi-step tasks.

Apple declined to confirm the specific timeline, reiterating that the new Siri is slated for release “in the coming year,” a phrasing that has long been a point of debate, with some interpreting it as a vague reference to 2025, while others read it as confirmation of a 2026 launch.

Internally, the target has slipped multiple times: the original goal was a fall 2024 rollout, followed by early 2025, then May, and now sometime next spring.

Per Gurman’s reporting on the issue, the delays stemmed from engineering issues, including a buggy hybrid architecture that combined old and new systems, and failed about a third of the time.

The setbacks and slow rollout have triggered changes at the executive level. Apple’s head of AI, John Giannandrea, has reportedly been sidelined from Siri and other consumer-facing projects following internal friction over missed deadlines.

The project is now under the leadership of Craig Federighi and Vision Pro lead Mike Rockwell, with the core tech (dubbed “Siri LLM”) undergoing a ground-up rebuild.

At WWDC 2025 this week, Federighi acknowledged the Siri delays during Apple’s keynote, saying the work “needed more time to reach our high quality bar.”

However, the company did not offer a public demo or update on Siri itself, focusing instead on the rollout of Apple Intelligence and new developer-facing LLM tools.

Looking further ahead, Gurman says Apple has plans for a far more advanced version of Siri, one that functions as a real-time, proactive digital copilot:

What exactly that will look like is still unclear, and likely to evolve. But in the meantime, mark your calendars (in pencil) for March 2026 as the earliest realistic window for the new Siri. Assuming, of course, there are no further delays.