Regulatory Analysis — 450 million Europeans will get iOS 27 without Siri AI. Apple blames the DMA. The EU says Apple simply refused to comply. The structural truth: both sides are right, and the impasse reveals a fundamental design conflict between AI and competition law.
Siri AI reads your screen, accesses your messages, photos, calendar, and contacts. The three-tier routing system sends queries to on-device models, Apple servers, or Google Cloud — with privacy guarantees at every step.
The DMA requires Apple to let competing assistants — Google, Alexa, ChatGPT — have the same deep system access. Apple’s argument: granting third-party AI systems the same level of device access that Siri has would create privacy and security risks Apple cannot control.
Apple proposed a “Trusted System Agent” framework — an intermediary that would give competitors access to Siri-level capabilities through Apple’s privacy layer. The EU rejected it.
Apple asked for an 18-month exemption to deploy Siri AI while developing a DMA-compliant interoperability solution. The EU rejected that too.
Core claim: Deep AI integration requires deep device access. Deep device access to third parties = privacy risk Apple can’t mitigate.
EU COMMISSION’S POSITION
“Apple refused to comply”
EU spokesperson Thomas Regnier: “The decision not to roll out Siri AI in the EU is Apple’s and Apple’s only. Apple was simply unable to develop interoperability solutions that meet essential EU privacy and security standards.”
The DMA requires gatekeepers to ensure interoperability. If Apple deploys a system-level AI assistant, competing AI assistants must have “an equal chance to be chosen by iPhone users.”
The EU rejected Apple’s Trusted System Agent proposal — arguing it still gave Siri structural advantages. The 18-month exemption request was called a “non-starter” that would violate competition rules.
The EU’s counter-argument on privacy: “Instead of trying to find a suitable compliance solution, Apple simply made a request to be exempted from its interoperability obligations.”
Core claim:Apple is using privacy as a pretext to maintain Siri’s monopoly on system-level AI access. The DMA exists precisely to prevent this.
Why Both Sides Are Right
Apple is right that deep AI integration creates real privacy risks. Siri AI reads your screen, your messages, your photos. It routes queries through a three-tier privacy system. Granting the same depth of access to Google Assistant or ChatGPT — with their own data practices, their own cloud infrastructure, their own privacy policies — genuinely does create risks that Apple cannot control. This is not a hypothetical concern.
The EU is right that the DMA exists to prevent exactly this. The entire point of the Digital Markets Act is to prevent gatekeepers from using their platform position to favor their own services over competitors. If Apple can deploy a system-level AI assistant that reads everything on your phone, but no competitor can, that is the textbook definition of self-preferencing. Privacy becomes a structural advantage that entrenches the monopoly.
The Structural Conflict
The real problem is not Apple or the EU. It is that AI-era products are structurally incompatible with competition-era regulation.
Competition-Era Logic
Apps are modular. Users can switch between them freely. The platform must not favor its own app.
AI-Era Reality
The AI agent IS the interface. It reads everything. It routes everything. Making it interchangeable breaks the privacy architecture.
The DMA was written for an app-store world where Spotify competes with Apple Music and should get equal treatment. It was not written for a world where the AI assistant reads your screen, your messages, and your biometric data, and the question is whether Google should get to do the same thing inside Apple’s privacy stack.
Who Wins, Who Loses
Google:Gemini app available directly on iPhone. Gets the EU user relationshipApple’s harness was designed to prevent.
OpenAI:ChatGPT becomes the de facto AI assistant for 450M EU iPhone users.
Meta:Meta AI across WhatsApp, Instagram, Ray-Bans fills the vacuum in Europe.
Apple:Two-tier product. US/Asia gets the full harness. EU gets a crippled iPhone.
EU Users:450M people get an iPhone without the headline AI feature. In the name of protecting their choice.
The Hypocrisy Argument
Critics point to a contradiction in Apple’s privacy stance: Apple stores iCloud data on Chinese government servers (through a partnership with Guizhou-Cloud Big Data, a state-owned entity) while simultaneously arguing that EU interoperability requirements create unacceptable privacy risks.
The structural read: Apple’s privacy argument is selectively applied. In China, market access trumps privacy. In the EU, privacy trumps market access. The variable is not privacy — it is how much leverage Apple has in each jurisdiction.
As we analyzed in Apple’s Agent OS Bet, the entire WWDC 2026 thesis rests on the agent becoming the computer — with Apple owning the place where the agent runs. The DMA fractures this thesis geographically:
US/Asia: The full agent OS. Siri AI orchestrates apps, reads context, routes queries. The harness is complete.
EU: The agent is absent on iPhone and iPad. Users interact with apps the old way — tapping icons, navigating manually. The 2007 model persists.
If the EU maintains this position through 2027 and beyond, European iPhone users will be on a structurally different computing platform than the rest of the world. The same hardware. Different software. Different capabilities. Different era.
That is the real cost of the impasse. Not that Apple loses revenue in Europe. But that 450 million people get left behind in a computing transition because the regulatory framework was built for a world that no longer exists.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
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