TL;DR
- AI Bootcamp: Apple is sending roughly 200 Siri engineers to a weekslong AI coding bootcamp ahead of WWDC 2026.
- Team Split: Around 60 engineers will continue Siri development while another 60 focus on testing and evaluation.
- Internal Pressure: The Siri team has been characterized as a laggard in AI tool adoption compared to other Apple divisions.
- Broader Context: Apple faces a shareholder lawsuit, repeated Siri delays, and a $1 billion Gemini deal with Google to close the AI gap.
Apple is sending roughly 200 Siri engineers to a weekslong AI coding bootcamp, The Information reported on April 15, citing people familiar with the matter. The training initiative comes roughly seven weeks before WWDC 2026 in Cupertino, California, where Apple is expected to unveil a major Siri overhaul. Apple has not commented on the report.
Internally, the Siri team has earned a “reputation as a laggard inside Apple” when it comes to AI coding tools, according to The Information. Other Apple divisions have allocated large parts of their budgets to tools like Claude Code, making Siri’s slower adoption a conspicuous outlier. Moreover, a pending shareholder lawsuit and repeated product delays add further pressure on Apple to deliver results at WWDC.
How the Team Is Splitting Up
Not every Siri engineer will attend the bootcamp. Around 60 team members will continue working on Siri during the training period, while another 60 will focus on evaluating how the assistant performs and whether it meets safety standards. Roughly 200 remaining engineers will attend the intensive training program aimed at closing the AI tools gap.
Meanwhile, Apple is simultaneously testing Siri to ensure it can reliably interpret and execute user commands, a priority after earlier versions were found making errors and responding too slowly. Per The Information, other Apple teams have embraced AI-powered development tools far more aggressively, and the bootcamp is designed to bring the Siri division in line with the rest of Apple.
In effect, splitting the team three ways while maintaining active Siri development signals that Apple cannot afford to pause work on the assistant even temporarily. With roughly two-thirds of the division pulled into training or evaluation roles, the bootcamp amounts to a controlled disruption of the team’s normal workflow at a pivotal juncture.
A Pattern of Siri Setbacks
Apple’s voice assistant division has faced a cascade of problems over the past year. Siri’s team failed to deliver the Apple Intelligence version of the assistant promised in Apple’s AI overhaul roadmap, triggering a major restructuring.
Former Apple AI chief John Giannandrea stepped aside amid Apple’s Siri crisis in late 2025 and retired the week of April 15, 2026, following the final vesting of his stock. Software engineering chief Craig Federighi assumed oversight of AI development, and Mike Rockwell, who previously led the Vision Pro project, now heads the Siri team.
However, Federighi had previously viewed AI as unpredictable and difficult to control, preferring deterministic software behavior. By placing Siri under executives with hardware and platform engineering backgrounds rather than AI research experience, Apple appears to view the assistant’s problems as execution failures rather than research shortcomings.
Adding to the setbacks, Apple delayed several Siri capabilities in February 2026 that were originally expected in March, pushing them to May or September after the assistant was found making mistakes and responding too slowly. Siri delays also forced Apple to postpone its smart home display device launch, according to a March 2026 report.
The WWDC Stakes
Against this backdrop, Apple struck a $1 billion Gemini deal with Google under Federighi to power Siri and other Apple Intelligence features. By turning to an external partner, Apple acknowledged it could not close the AI gap with internal resources alone. Apple had delayed Siri AI improvementsdespite running advertisements promoting the assistant’s capabilities, a gap that fueled both public skepticism and investor scrutiny.
A shareholder class-action lawsuit complicates the picture, alleging Apple misled investors about its progress in adding AI features to Siri. On February 26, 2026, Apple asked a federal judge to dismiss the suit, which claims the company overstated its AI capabilities to inflate its stock price.
Taken together, the Gemini partnership, the lawsuit, and now the bootcamp paint a picture of a company addressing Siri’s shortcomings on multiple fronts simultaneously. Whether a weekslong training program can meaningfully accelerate a team that has struggled for years to deliver on Apple’s AI promises will become clearer when WWDC opens on June 8.
For now, the bootcamp stands as the latest visible chapter in Apple’s protracted effort to transform Siri into a competitive AI assistant, and a tacit admission that the team building the voice assistant had fallen behind the rest of the company.
