Siri AI may require a paid subscription for heavy users

On Tim Cook’s final earnings call before formally resigning as Apple’s CEO, artificial intelligence was a hot topic of conversation. The investor community is interested in Siri AI’s potential to boost iPhone upgrades, and at the same time concerned about what it means for Apple’s rising capital expenditure costs.

Cook suggested that the financial outlook for Siri AI is still unclear, but did mention in passing that heavy users of Siri AI will be faced with an iCloud+ subscription paywall.

Siri AI is presented as a free feature of the iPhone, iPad, and Mac operating systems. But it is very much a service, in the sense that it costs Apple money to run on an ongoing basis, with LLM queries being sent to Apple’s cloud and third-party cloud infrastructure for processing, depending on the nature of the request.

For the first time, Apple has publicly suggested that there will be a paid component to Siri AI. While the exact usage limits are not yet known, Cook indicated that customers cannot use Siri AI for free indefinitely. At some point, usage will be throttled, and heavy users of the new Siri system will need to purchase an iCloud+ plan.

Obviously, the devil is in the details. How many times can you use Siri AI for free before you hit the quotas? We don’t know yet.

The company had previously indicated that the new image generation features (like the iOS 27 Clean Up and Extend tools in Photos, or the revamped Image Playground app) will have usage limits, and that users who are iCloud+ subscribers will have higher limits. In the current developer and public betas, these limits are not being enforced … so we don’t know yet how permissive they will be.

Similarly, the new Apple Intelligence features for video recordings in the Home app require the 2 TB iCloud plan. Access to the new Cloud Pro model in the Shortcuts app is also exclusively available to users on the higher iCloud+ tiers.

iOS 27 with Siri AI requires an iOS device or Mac capable of Apple Intelligence, and will launch later this year. On the iPhone side, that means iPhone 15 Pro or newer. Due to regulatory restrictions, Siri AI will not be available in Europe or China for the foreseeable future.