Tim Cook says Siri AI could get a paywall via iCloud+

In his final earnings call as Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook said the company’s long-awaited Siri AI upgrade could come with paywalled limits for heavy users, though he conceded the plans are not set in stone. Cook envisions letting users buy more compute for Siri AI through Apple’s existing iCloud+ subscriptions, which currently offer extended cloud storage.

“We do believe there will be people that want to use [Siri AI] a lot, and so we will have some kind of upgrade possibilities on iCloud+, where people can buy up the stack on iCloud+, and we’ll see how the pickup for that is,” Cook said on Thursday, adding that Apple could not be more excited about where Siri AI stands today. Most other AI providers, including Anthropic and OpenAI, already operate this way, offering a limited free tier with the option to pay for more usage. The upgraded Siri AI is available now in the iOS 27 beta and is planned to roll out more broadly this fall.

Cook’s remarks come as longtime Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering John Ternus prepares to take over as CEO, stepping in at a critical moment for Apple. The company has fallen behind in building an advanced AI assistant, even licensing a custom Gemini model from direct competitor Google to augment Siri. The overhaul was delayed long enough that Apple had to pay $250 million to settle a class action lawsuit over how it marketed the iPhone 16’s AI capabilities.

Apple is also facing the same supply crunch as every other hardware maker. The AI-driven RAM shortage has made hardware more expensive to build, pushing companies including Meta, Samsung, Microsoft, and Sony to raise prices on some devices. Apple raised the price of Macs and iPads last month, but has yet to adjust pricing on its existing iPhone models.

Why it matters

A paywalled Siri AI would put Apple’s AI monetization in line with Anthropic and OpenAI’s freemium models, arriving just as a new CEO takes over and rising memory costs squeeze margins across the hardware industry.