Alphabet won’t talk about the Google-Apple AI deal, even to investors

Alphabet declined to address questions from one of its investors about Google’s AI partnership with Apple during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday. When an analyst asked how the company is thinking about AI partnerships — including the agreement with Apple to help power AI features for Siri — the question went unanswered.

That silence, however, is revealing. It suggests Alphabet is not yet prepared to publicly discuss how the Apple partnership could affect its core business, which is increasingly centered on artificial intelligence.

Historically, the relationship between Google and Apple has been highly beneficial for both sides. Their long-running search deal involved Google paying Apple about $20 billion to remain the default search engine on iPhones, according to disclosures from the U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit against Google. In exchange, Google gained access to Apple’s enormous global user base. Apple recently said it now has roughly 2.5 billion active devices worldwide, underscoring the scale of that reach.

The latest AI agreement between the two companies is rumored to cost Apple around $1 billion per year. Unlike the search deal, however, the immediate upside for Google is less clear. In traditional Google Search, ads appear prominently at the top of results, linking users directly to advertisers’ websites. But ads within AI Mode — which could eventually become central to Google’s search experience — remain experimental.

Google first announced in May that it would introduce advertising into AI Mode, its chatbot-style search interface. In early tests, ads appear either below or embedded within AI-generated responses. The company is also experimenting with agentic shopping features, including Shop with AI Mode, which are designed to guide users from product discovery to checkout directly within the AI interface.

At the same time, Google faces pressure from competitors taking a different approach. Anthropic, for example, is positioning itself against ad-supported AI through a forthcoming Super Bowl advertisement that questions the advertising-driven models being pursued by OpenAI and Google.

How these competing strategies will shape the future of AI-powered search and assistants remains uncertain — and for now, unanswered.

Notably, the Apple–Siri AI partnership received little attention during Alphabet’s earnings call. Google CEO Sundar Pichai briefly said he was pleased that Google is Apple’s “preferred cloud provider” and that the company would help build “the next generation of Apple foundation models based on Gemini technology.” Google Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler echoed that same phrasing when referencing Apple, offering no additional detail.