Nearly 200 Siri engineers are heading to an intensive AI coding bootcamp as Apple scrambles to retrain a team that has fallen behind competitors, according to reports from The Information. The multi-week training program leaves only about 60 developers working on core Siri development while another 60 evaluate the assistant's performance.
The emergency retraining comes less than two months before Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June, where the company is expected to unveil a long-delayed overhaul of its voice assistant. Siri was originally scheduled to receive major AI upgrades in 2025 as part of Apple Intelligence, but executives delayed the launch until spring 2026 after determining early versions weren't reliable enough to ship.
Apple's Siri organization has developed what The Information describes as "a reputation as a laggard inside Apple." While other teams within the company have embraced AI coding tools like Claude Code, allocating significant budgets for them, the Siri team reportedly hasn't kept pace with fast-moving changes in programming technology.
The bootcamp represents more than routine professional development. It signals a fundamental shift from Siri's legacy architecture of intent-based heuristics, essentially complex webs of "if-then" scripts, toward modern large language model orchestration.
This transition requires engineers to master new skills in quantization, PyTorch, and Apple's Core ML framework to optimize models for on-device execution without draining battery or overheating devices.
Only around 60 members of the core Siri development team will remain at their posts during the training period, with an additional 60 engineers focused on evaluating how Siri handles user commands and meets Apple's safety standards. The company is testing extensively to ensure the revamped assistant can properly interpret and execute complex instructions.
This organizational shakeup follows broader changes in Apple's AI leadership. Former AI chief John Giannandrea left the company earlier this month after stepping down from his role in December.
Software engineering head Craig Federighi now oversees AI development, while Mike Rockwell, who led development of the Vision Pro, heads the Siri team.
Under Federighi's direction, Apple secured a deal with Google that will power Siri and other AI features using Gemini models. The new Siri experience is expected to debut at WWDC on June 8 and arrive later this year as part of iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 updates.
The training program's exact format remains unclear, including whether Apple will conduct it internally or partner with external AI labs. What is certain is that after years of playing catch-up in voice assistant technology, Apple is making an aggressive push to transform Siri from a simple command interpreter into what industry observers describe as an "agentic" AI capable of reasoning through complex multi-step tasks across applications.
