Breaking News! Apple's AI Suffers Heavy Losses: Former Head of Siri Resigns, Core Team Poached, New Features Delayed until 2026

From its high - profile mid - year stance to the product launch of "Light AI" in September, Apple's AI has lost momentum in the past six months.

Recently, there have been further upheavals in Apple's AI leadership:

Robby Walker, the former head of Siri and a senior AI executive, is about to leave.

Robby Walker, the former head of Siri and a senior AI executive, is about to leave

Walker is one of the few direct reports to John Giannandrea, the head of AI.

Since 2022, he has been in charge of this voice assistant.

But earlier this year, due to the delay in the release of the new version of Siri, Walker was removed from the project.

Subsequently, the project was handed over to software director Craig Federighi to take charge.

According to people familiar with the matter, Walker plans to leave Apple next month.

From Siri to "AKI"

On October 4, 2011, the day after Apple launched Siri, Steve Jobs passed away after a long battle with cancer.

Since then, the Siri team has lost its initial vision - not only has the progress been slow, but the person in charge has also been frequently replaced.

In 2013, Apple acquired the personal assistant app startup Cue. Its founder Robby Walker and his team joined as well.

Seven years later, Walker was promoted to senior director of the Siri team.

Walker's promotion path

In 2025, Walker was transferred to the newly established "Answers, Information, and Knowledge" (AKI) team as senior director.

As the name suggests, the core task of this team is to build a new "answer engine" that can not only understand questions and integrate information but also directly generate answers like ChatGPT.

Different from the externally - connected ChatGPT, AKI aims to reconstruct from the bottom - up and redefine the "Apple - style AI search experience."

In a sense, this is Apple's first attempt to truly master the answers themselves rather than "rely on others to answer."

According to a previous report by The Information, during his tenure as the head of Siri, Walker became the focus of criticism within Apple for his reluctance to take significant risks.

Frequent Strategies, but Slow Implementation

Although Walker's responsibilities and team have been significantly reduced in the past few months, he is still an influential figure in Apple's AI strategy.

Walker's departure is just a microcosm of the wave of departures of executives and engineers from Apple's AI department.

Previously, Ruoming Pang, who led Apple's AI model team, jumped to Meta, and many of the engineers and researchers under his leadership also left.

Last month, another senior executive in charge of search services, Frank Chu, also switched to Meta.

In the past six months, Apple has made frequent strategic moves in AI.

Craig Federighi, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering

In April, Mike Rockwell, the former head of Vision Pro, took over Siri engineering and reorganized the team. Siri's overall management returned to the line of software director Craig Federighi, indicating a "promoted rectification" of the voice assistant project.

In May, it was reported that Apple was developing AI server chips to support the deployment of AI capabilities in the cloud - edge collaboration, which is a forward - looking layout in underlying computing power and the supply chain.

In June, Apple evaluated using Anthropic or OpenAI's models to power the new version of Siri. This project was led by Rockwell and Federighi for evaluation.

However, the implementation pace of its AI has also raised questions.

Especially after the "Light AI" keynote at its September product launch, D.A. Davidson downgraded Apple's rating to neutral on the grounds that "AI progress did not meet expectations."

D.A. Davidson downgraded Apple's rating to neutral

Since Apple first showcased its new Apple Intelligence at WWDC in June 2024, it has not launched new Siri upgrade features.

Apple said that it plans to launch its delayed personalized Siri features in the spring of 2026, attributing the delay to persistent quality issues in the testing of new Siri features and will switch to a more powerful underlying architecture to solve these problems.

Robby Walker's departure, combined with factors such as the delay in Siri updates, has further magnified external doubts about Apple's AI innovation and implementation speed.

References:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025 - 09 - 12/apple - ai - and - search - executive - robby - walker - to - leave - iphone - maker%20

https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/apples - former - siri - leader - departs?rc=epv9gi

This article is from the WeChat official account "New Intelligence Yuan", author: New Intelligence Yuan, published by 36Kr with authorization.