Since 2015, Apple has designed iPhones to be inaccessible to law enforcement agencies and governments, even with a warrant.
In 2025 or 2026, I think they're going to abandon this privacy feature to get the new LLM powered version of Siri working.
Apple's privacy stance started in 2015, with a series of disputes between Apple and the FBI. The FBI ordered Apple to extract text messages and call logs from suspects' locked iPhones. Apple argued that they were "safe makers" not, "safe crackers". They didn't currently have the tools to break into an iPhone, and even if they technically could build them, the FBI couldn't make them do that.
It was never settled in court - the FBI walked away - and Apple avoided building the safe cracking tools. For ten years the status quo has been that Apple products can't be accessed by law enforcement. The new AI powered Siri is going to change that, by taking your data out of the safe and putting it on Apple's servers.
New Siri
To make new Siri smart enough, Apple needs to run it on a powerful server instead of on your iPhone. To give Siri the features Apple has advertised [1], they need to send your calendar, contacts, text messages, and more to that server. Once that data leaves your iPhone it becomes much harder for Apple to make the same "safe cracker" argument - the FBI demands and gets data from servers at Google, Facebook, and Apple every day.
Apple's Plan B
Apple has a plan to get around this server weakness - what they call "private cloud compute".
Private cloud compute is a server so secure that even Apple can't retrieve data from it. Data can be handed from your (secure) iPhone to the (secure) server, processed with their new AI, and handed back to your phone without Apple ever seeing it. If the FBI gets a warrant, Apple can make the safe cracking argument again.
Apple released an extensive report on how they are going to build privacy cloud compute, but in short it is going to be super complicated. Apple needs to design and build their own servers, which is unheard of in the industry. These servers need to be really powerful - powerful enough to compete with the dedicated AI chips produced by NVIDIA. To prevent tampering the servers need to be assembled at a new manufacturing facility in the United States. Apple needs to assemble hundreds of thousands of these servers to run new Siri for all of their users.
Someone at Apple managed to convince their CEO Tim Cook that this could be done in just a few months. I think that it's going to take them at least two years. Will Apple let Google and OpenAI eat their lunch in the meantime?
The end
For now, Apple is sticking with their private cloud compute plan, trying to rush out the servers and AI models that they need.
While doing this, they're facing the constant temptation to buy or rent traditional servers, giving them the ability to launch new Siri at any time.
Apple has to decide between user privacy and their ability to compete with Google and OpenAI. They've stuck with user privacy in the past, but never at such expense to their products. Ultimately as a company that exists to sell more phones, I suspect Apple is going to take the hit to their reputation and give up on the elaborate private cloud design in order to ship new Siri in 2025 or 2026.