The standoff over whether Europe gets Apple’s new Siri may finally be thawing, or at least the two sides are back in the room. Tim Cook held talks with EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen on Tuesday about getting Siri AI into the bloc without falling foul of its digital rulebook, according to the Financial Times. Both sides are calling it “constructive,” which in regulatory speak usually means nobody stormed out and the door is still open.
Here is why it matters. Siri AI arrives free with iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 in September, but the enhanced, chatbot-style version is not coming to iPhones and iPads in the EU until Apple works out a route through the bloc’s rules. That is a big list of features Europeans miss out on: the new Siri app for revisiting past conversations, beefed-up Visual Intelligence, built-in writing tools, a dedicated Siri mode in the Camera app, and more besides. So this is not a minor feature footnote, it is a genuine gap between what European users get and what everyone else does.
The sticking point is the Digital Markets Act. As the Commission reads it, Apple has to let rival AI assistants tap into the same underlying iPhone capabilities that Siri uses, so they can carry out the same kinds of tasks on your behalf, with your consent. Apple’s answer was something it called a Trusted System Agent, a piece of intermediary software meant to give third-party assistants secure access to the same system features as Siri AI on EU devices. Apple’s version of events is that the EU knocked the idea back.
The EU tells it very differently. Regulators pushed back hard, insisting the decision not to launch Siri AI in Europe was Apple’s alone, and that the company was chasing an exemption from its legal obligations rather than an actual compliant fix. In their telling, Apple asked for a blanket pass on its interoperability duties under the DMA, which is simply not something the Commission is able to grant.
That framing has consequences beyond the boardroom. The row has landed the Commission in hot water with the public, with FT reporting that Brussels fielded hundreds of emails from frustrated consumers accusing it of blocking Europeans from the new tech. When users start blaming the regulator rather than the company, that is a headache Brussels would rather avoid.
On the Trusted System Agent specifically, a Commission official was blunt, saying contact with Apple had been limited and that there was never a concrete proposal, just the broad concept without detail on how it would actually work. The official accused Apple of angling for permission to delay compliance rather than deliver it, warning that letting Apple ship its product while stalling interoperability for rivals could entrench its position for two years or more before competitors got a fair shot.
The pointed contrast came at the end. The same official noted that changes Google made to Android were enough to prompt a formal consultation on how it could comply and dodge heavy fines, the implication being that Google engaged where Apple, in their eyes, has not. Apple has stayed quiet on this latest round. But with a September launch bearing down and European users already grumbling, both sides have a reason to turn “constructive” into something concrete before iOS 27 ships without its headline feature on the continent.
