Millions of iPhone and iPad users across the European Union will miss out on Apple’s most significant upgrade to Siri in years, after the company confirmed that its new Siri AI features will not launch on iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 in the bloc.
While users in the rest of the world gain access to a profoundly more capable, context-aware assistant later this year, Europeans will remain stuck with the existing version of Siri due to compliance challenges posed by the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Apple unveiled Siri AI at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2026 as a rebuilt, intelligence-powered assistant capable of natural multi-step conversations, deep personal context understanding, and advanced actions across a user’s device.
The upgrade includes a dedicated Siri app for reviewing conversation history, enhanced Visual Intelligence for analysing on-screen content and photos, integrated writing and productivity tools, a new Siri mode in the Camera app for real-time queries, and broader multimodal capabilities that allow it to search messages, emails, and apps before taking complex actions on the user’s behalf.
These features, which combine on-device processing with Private Cloud Compute for privacy protections, represent a major leap forward in making Siri competitive with leading AI assistants.
Yet EU users on their primary mobile devices will not receive them at launch, creating a clear divide between European consumers and those elsewhere.
Apple has voiced deep frustration with EU regulators.
The company said it spent months proposing solutions, including a “Trusted System Agent” designed to let third-party virtual assistants access similar capabilities safely, but every suggestion was rejected by Brussels.
Under what Apple describes as an “extreme interpretation” of the DMA, the rules would require granting rival AI systems near-unlimited direct access to users’ private data and the ability to autonomously control apps, read messages, make purchases, and edit files without Apple’s essential privacy and security safeguards.
“We’re deeply disappointed that our EU users won’t have Siri AI on iPhone or iPad when we share our new software releases later this year,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering.
The company warned that complying as demanded would expose European users to heightened risks of data breaches and security threats.
The decision leaves EU consumers with the legacy Siri experience on iOS and iPadOS, while the upgraded version will still roll out on Mac, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro devices in the bloc for supported languages.
Apple has provided no timeline for when iPhone and iPad users in Europe might gain access.
Brussels Signal reached out to the European Commission for a reaction but did not receive a reply at the time of publication. (see update below)
Dirk Auer, Director of Competition Policy the International Centre for Law & Economics (ICLE) told Brussels Signal that “Apple’s decision is striking precisely because it is so costly to Apple itself.”
“No company forgoes a flagship feature on its best-selling devices, in a market as large and wealthy as the EU, unless the regulatory cost of shipping it has become genuinely prohibitive. This shows how far the DMA now influences how digital goods are designed for Europe.”
“One important problem is that, in this instance, the DMA is producing less competition, not more. The market for AI assistants is fiercely contested—OpenAI, Anthropic and others are racing ahead, and Apple (albeit working with Google’s models) was trying to enter that contest with a serious new product.
“The DMA is the one thing keeping that product out of European hands. Removing a competitor from the field is the opposite of the contestability the Act was meant to deliver.
“Underlying this is a trade off between openness and security that the DMA is badly calibrated to handle. To meet the Act’s interoperability demands, Apple says it would have to grant any third-party assistant the same deep, autonomous access to a user’s device that Siri AI relies on—reading messages, making payments, acting across apps.
“Forcing that openness is precisely what creates the security and privacy risk: The same access that makes an assistant useful makes it dangerous in the wrong hands, and the DMA mandates the openness while leaving the safeguards behind.
“The fact that the very same feature is shipping on Mac and Apple Vision (which do not fall under the DMA) shows the constraint is the regulation, not the technology. The result, once again, is that European consumers end up with fewer competing options and a worse product than Americans get.”
The next generation of Apple Intelligence powers an entirely new Siri: making the apps and experiences you rely on across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro more personal and helpful than ever. pic.twitter.com/aXiDIkqAKn
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) June 8, 2026
The innovations with AI will strongly change and personalise interactions with technology.
For example, a person landing at an airport after a long overnight flight from another continent could simply say: “Hey Siri, I’m exhausted and hungry. Find me a quiet hotel room with a good view under €250 a night, book it for two nights, check today’s weather, and send my wife the booking details with a couple of photos from the flight.”
The new Siri AI would handle the entire request in one natural conversation. It would understand the context of jet lag, search for suitable hotels matching the budget and preference for quiet, complete the booking, check the weather forecast, pull up relevant photos from the journey, and send a clear message to the user’s wife with all the information.
If the traveller later adds, “Actually, make sure it has a balcony,” Siri would instantly update the reservation and confirm the change without any need to repeat steps.
In the European Union, however, iPhone and iPad owners will remain limited to the old Siri, forcing them to handle each part of the task manually across separate apps in a far slower and more fragmented way.
The White House has said European Commission fines on Apple and Meta Platforms were a “novel form of economic extortion” that the US would not tolerate. https://t.co/vz4RvgOxv2
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) April 24, 2025
Update:
EC spokesperson Thomas Regnier told journalists at the midday press briefing that it was Apple’s own choice not to roll out the new technology and that “absolutely nothing in the DMA prohibits apple from introducing new products in the EU”.
However, he added, Apple can not “close the market”, “just like any other gatekeeper.”
“It is not for them to decide who gets to innovate in Europe” or “to choose which AI tools our EU citizens get to use or not”.
Regnier said there needs to be fair and open competition among developers.
He said that people needed to know “the true story” and explained that the Commission has had a few contacts with Apple, but that the tech form was “simply unable to develop interoperability solutions that meet essential EU privacy and security standards”.
“Instead of trying to find a suitable compliance solution, Apple simply made a request to the EC to be exempted from their interoperability obligations under the DMA.” Regnier added that Apple had done this for 18 months.
He said that no AI agent other than Siri AI would have an equal change to be chosen by Iphone users.
Regnier ended his intervention by stating that “EU law is non-negotiable”.
“The Commission won’t give any exemptions, just like a police officer wold not exempt a driver from respecting the speed limit.”
