Apple Inc. is preparing to enter the increasingly crowded market for AI-powered search with a new product called “World Knowledge Answers,” Bloomberg reported Wednesday.
The system, which is expected to debut next year, is being designed as an AI-driven answer engine that will compete directly with offerings from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, and Google’s new AI-powered search features.
According to people familiar with the matter, Apple plans to integrate the tool into Siri, its voice assistant, in what is expected to be a major overhaul of the product. The rollout, scheduled for spring, will later extend to Safari and Spotlight search on iPhones, enabling users to query information across the internet using natural language — a significant expansion of Siri’s long-limited functionality.
Executives describe the project as a next-generation “answer engine” that will allow Apple devices to respond conversationally to questions, summarize web content, and generate answers on the fly — capabilities already popularized by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Perplexity, a fast-growing AI startup that has positioned itself as an AI-native search challenger.
Partnership with Google
In a sign of how aggressively Apple is racing to catch up in AI, the iPhone maker has struck a formal agreement with Alphabet Inc.’s Google this week to test and evaluate one of Google’s AI models as part of the system. The move underlines Apple’s pragmatic approach: while the company has developed its own AI models internally, it may source external technology from Google to accelerate the launch.
Apple and Google have a long-running partnership, with Google paying billions annually to remain the default search provider on Apple devices. Extending the relationship into the AI search era suggests both companies are aware of the disruptive potential of AI-native competitors such as OpenAI and Perplexity, which threaten the dominance of traditional keyword-based search.
The planned Siri overhaul is one of the most significant in the product’s 13-year history. Since its launch in 2011, Siri has often lagged rivals in accuracy and versatility, particularly compared to Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant. Apple hopes that by embedding generative AI and real-time web search, Siri can shift from a voice-controlled utility to a powerful, context-aware assistant.
A Familiar Apple Playbook
Apple has been criticized for dragging its feet in the AI arms race, with some analysts suggesting that it buys Perplexity to catch up. However, Apple’s strategy of arriving late to a major technological shift but then using its ecosystem to dominate has been seen before. In the early 2000s, Apple entered the digital music space after several rivals but reshaped the industry with iTunes and the iPod, locking millions of users into its ecosystem. In 2007, it was hardly the first to market with a smartphone, yet the iPhone redefined mobile computing and pushed competitors into Apple’s design-driven framework. Even with Apple Pay, the company followed established payment solutions but leveraged its iPhone dominance to make mobile payments mainstream.
The move into AI search fits this pattern. Apple has been slower than rivals in the AI arms race, with Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic setting the pace. But with its tight integration across devices and services, the iPhonemaker could once again turn a late entry into a dominant position.
The AI Search Race
The bottom line highlights how quickly the search industry is being reshaped by AI. Google has already rolled out AI Overviews, Microsoft’s Bing integrates with OpenAI’s GPT models, and startups like Perplexity are positioning themselves as “Google alternatives.” Apple’s entry — with deep integration into its hardware ecosystem — could instantly give it a massive user base, though questions remain about how its answer engine will balance accuracy, privacy, and speed.
If launched as planned in spring 2026, World Knowledge Answers would mark Apple’s most ambitious push into AI yet — and a turning point for a company under pressure to prove it can compete in the fast-moving world of generative AI.
