Apple rebuilds Siri on Gemini; US weighs equity stakes in AI labs

At its WWDC keynote, Apple confirmed that the next generation of its Apple Intelligence features — including a rebuilt, chatbot-style Siri — will run on a custom Google Gemini model, under a multi-year deal reportedly worth about $1 billion a year. The roughly 1.2-trillion-parameter model runs inside Apple's Private Cloud Compute, and Apple says Google cannot use the queries to train Gemini. A new Extensions system also lets users route requests to rival assistants like Claude and Grok.

In a rare left-right convergence, President Trump said the US government may take equity stakes in OpenAI and xAI, while Senator Bernie Sanders is preparing a bill that would route half of major AI firms' stock into a public sovereign wealth fund. OpenAI has floated donating shares rather than selling them to seed such a fund. Anthropic is notably absent from the talks, a legacy of its February standoff with the Pentagon over usage guardrails.

DeepSeek is close to sealing its first-ever outside funding round — about $7.4 billion, or 50 billion yuan — in one of China's largest startup financings. Tencent and battery maker CATL are the biggest external backers, alongside the state-backed National AI Industry Investment Fund and founder Liang Wenfeng, who is committing roughly $3 billion himself. The deal would value China's open-weights champion at $52 to $59 billion and signals Beijing's resolve to keep pace with the US capital surge.

GitHub switched Copilot from flat-rate subscriptions to usage-based, token-metered billing, and developers are furious. Power users running agentic coding sessions report their costs could jump as much as 10 to 50 times, with some $29-a-month plans projected to balloon past $700; GitHub also removed the unlimited fallback model. The change makes Copilot's real cost depend on how heavily each developer leans on AI, and rivals are already courting the backlash.

At Computex 2026, Perplexity unveiled what it calls the first hybrid local-cloud inference orchestrator for its Computer agent. A small model on the device sizes up each task and either runs it locally or, with the user's permission, routes it to a frontier model in the cloud — keeping financial, health, and personal files on-device by default. The model- and chip-agnostic system runs on Intel and NVIDIA hardware and is set to reach Perplexity Computer in July, with Windows support on a waitlist.

WeRide, Uber, and fleet operator AVOMO will launch Spain's first commercial robotaxi service in the Madrid region, their first joint move into Europe. Rides will be bookable through the Uber app in partnership with Madrid's regional government, starting with trained safety operators on board before scaling toward fully driverless service as performance milestones are met. The trio plans to add hundreds of WeRide-powered vehicles over time.