I'm glad Apple isn't hyping up agentic AI (yet)

Unlike its peers, Apple was more focused on making AI seem useful at WWDC.

If you were to take a shot every time someone mentioned "agentic" AI at the most recent tech keynotes — Google I/O, Microsoft Build and NVIDIA's Computex blowout — you'd be sick in no time. It's the industry's latest buzzword, describing AI agents that can do work on your behalf without any direct input, like automatically adding meetings to your calendar based on your emails. It's as if the tech world can't wait to sit back and let AI take the wheel. We'll probably see impressive agentic AI within a decade or so, but I worry about leaping into a world of agents with our current batch of AI models, which can still hallucinate and aren't entirely trustworthy. The idea of letting current AI agents act entirely on their own seems like sheer insanity.

Apple, once again, seems to be thinking a bit differently. Agentic AI was only briefly mentioned during its WWDC 2026 keynote this week. Instead, Apple spent the majority of the time talking about the ways its new Siri AI could actually be useful: Like finding a friend's new address buried in a long text message thread, or figuring out how to get tickets to an exclusive concert. For the most part, Siri AI responds to your commands, it just has the benefit of modern AI models to better synthesize data.

Based on our early look at Siri AI at WWDC 2026, it seems to work as advertised, though we'll need to perform long-term testing to see if it really holds up. We're also dealing with the first developer beta, so there's a lot of room for things to change between now and when Apple's latest OS updates drop this fall. But as an AI skeptic, I'm surprised to find myself intrigued by the possibilities of Siri AI, more so than I've been for anything around Microsoft's Copilot.

Apple's commitment to privacy with Private Cloud Compute also gives it a leg up on Google and Microsoft — the company says it only uploads relevant data, makes it all anonymous and doesn't track server logs. For its new AFM3 Cloud Pro model, which runs on Google's servers with NVIDIA-powered hardware, Apple has also upgraded Private Cloud Compute to offer a similar amount of security.

"While we absolutely minimize what is sent up to PCC, the critical thing about PCC is, architecturally, that's at that point an efficiency measure," Craig Federighi, Apple's SVP of software engineering, said during a WWDC panel (via Ars Technica). "Because PCC itself, by design from the ground up, is going to vaporize any record of that data the moment after it answers your question... Thi