Kamal Ghorui
Apple is planning to send fewer than 200 Siri engineers to a multiweek AI coding bootcamp, according to The Information. The timing is striking—WWDC 2026 is just seven weeks away, and the company is expected to use the June 8 event to finally unveil the long-delayed revamp of its voice assistant. The bootcamp is designed to bring engineers up to speed on AI-assisted coding tools, including Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex—tools that have quietly become standard in much of the tech industry. Apple, apparently, is behind on this shift.While the cohort heads to training, around 60 engineers will stay on as the core Siri development team. Another 60 will focus on evaluating Siri’s performance—specifically, whether it’s hitting Apple’s safety standards and correctly executing user commands.
Apple’s own teams are already spending big on Claude Code—just not the Siri group
The bootcamp reflects a wider gap between the Siri team and the rest of Apple’s engineering organization. The Information reports that some Apple teams have been allocating large portions of their budgets to Claude Code, and that agentic coding tools are helping developers write more code faster. The Siri team, by contrast, has earned a reputation internally as a laggard.Xcode 26.3 added support for agentic coding utilities earlier this year—a move that signaled Apple’s broader embrace of AI in the development process. That makes it even more notable that the Siri group needed an external push to catch up.
Siri’s troubled history makes the bootcamp feel more urgent than typical training
This isn’t the first attempt to fix the Siri situation. Apple promised a smarter, AI-powered Siri in June 2024. It didn’t ship. Engineers struggled with core reliability issues—queries timing out, inaccurate responses, and a brittle split-infrastructure design that kept breaking when features were tested together. The rollout slipped from early 2025 to spring 2026, and then slipped again.In response, Apple removed longtime AI chief John Giannandrea from his role late last year—he officially left the company this week, following the final vesting of his stock on April 15. Craig Federighi, Apple’s software engineering head, took over AI oversight. Mike Rockwell, who led the Vision Pro project, is now running the Siri team.Under Federighi, Apple also inked a multiyear deal with Google, confirmed in January, which will see future versions of Siri and Apple Intelligence powered by Gemini models. The arrangement, reportedly worth around $1 billion a year, is a significant admission that Apple’s homegrown AI wasn’t cutting it.The revamped Siri—expected to handle multi-step commands and operate more like a chatbot—is slated for a WWDC announcement on June 8 and a fall release with iOS 27. Whether the bootcamp helps accelerate that work, or simply reflects how much ground the team still has to cover, remains to be seen.
