If you had to take a chance every time someone mentioned “agentic” AI at the most recent tech conferences – Google I/O, Microsoft Build, and NVIDIA’s Computex explosion – you’d be sick in no time. It’s the latest buzzword in the industry, describing AI agents that can work on your behalf without any direct intervention, such as automatically adding meetings to your calendar based on your emails. It’s like 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 launching into a world of agents with our current crop of AI models, which can still hallucinate and aren’t entirely trustworthy. The idea of letting today’s AI agents act entirely on their own seems like sheer madness.
Apple, once again, seems to think a little differently. Agentic AI was only briefly mentioned during its WWDC 2026 keynote this week. Instead, Apple spent the majority of its time talking about how its new AI Siri could actually be useful: like finding a friend’s new address buried in a long thread of text messages, or figuring out how to get tickets to an exclusive concert. Essentially, Siri AI responds to your commands, it just benefits from modern AI models to better synthesize data.
Based on our first look at Siri AI at WWDC 2026, it appears to work as advertised, although we’ll need to do some long-term testing to see if it really holds up. We’re also dealing with the first developer beta, so there’s plenty of room for things to change between now and the release of Apple’s latest operating system updates this fall. But as an AI skeptic, I’m surprised to find myself intrigued by the possibilities of Siri AI, even more so than anything related to 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 downloads relevant data, anonymizes it, and doesn’t track server logs. For its new AFM3 Cloud Pro model, which runs on Google servers with hardware powered by NVIDIA, Apple has also upgraded Private Cloud Compute to provide a similar level of security.
“While we absolutely minimize what is sent to the PCC, the essential aspect of the PCC is, architecturally speaking, that it is an efficiency measure at this point,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, said during a WWDC panel (via Ars Technica). “Because PCC itself, by design, is going to vaporize any record of that data as soon as it answers your question… It’s not all stored. It’s all in a form where it’s completely ephemeral.”
However, Apple couldn’t entirely resist the lure of agentic AI. And unsurprisingly, it also ties into one of the most troubling new Apple Intelligence features: the ability to automatically change your compromised passwords. Apple says the new Passwords app “securely navigates websites to sign in and upgrade their accounts to strong passwords.”
The potential problems are obvious: what else can happen when Apple Intelligence connects to this website? Can I really trust the password offered? Then again, I also know that I still have compromised passwords on unimportant websites, wouldn’t it be better to fix them automatically? The goal of making users more secure may be worth the slight loss of agency via Apple’s agent, but it’s a slippery slope.
Apple is also using agentic AI with Safari’s new “Notify Me” feature, which lets you set up an alert for specific changes on a website. This could be useful for tracking price changes or news updates around a specific organization – it’s certainly much better than keeping a tab open forever and constantly refreshing it. It’s easy to see how Apple could take this feature further: perhaps eventually, AI could automatically purchase a flagship product before it goes out of stock, or send an email to a group of friends if you’re looking at the price of a vacation property.
You could argue that Apple is far behind its competitors when it comes to AI in general, and you’d be right. Microsoft and Google rushed to integrate their AI capabilities into every nook and cranny of their consumer products, which made their investors happy (even if it arguably made those products worse). Apple, meanwhile, has faced delays in its AI-based Siri upgrade, first announced two years ago. The first batch of Apple Intelligence features, such as notification summaries and Genmojis, were quite disappointing (and in the case of these summaries, it led to some embarrassing errors).
However, Apple is rarely the first to adopt a new technology. He didn’t create the first MP3 player, smartphone, or ultraportable laptop. Instead, the company has generally focused on fixing the glaring problems of first market entrants, making its solutions more usable for consumers, and, of course, charging a ton of money for the privilege of using its more refined products. The iPod was a success because it could hold a ton of music, was easy to use, and tied into iTunes, the first major attempt to make digital music legally available. The iPhone has managed to overtake keyboard-equipped smartphones with a larger screen and more usable apps.
With Siri AI, Apple has the perspective to see where Microsoft failed with Copilot, and a clearer view of what AI features people might actually want to use. It will undoubtedly rely on more agent-based features as its models improve and consumers become more accustomed to AI. I just hope Apple remains judicious about how it applies agentic features. I’m already worried about Siri mishearing my voice commands, I don’t want to worry about it draining my bank account.
