Apple said Apple Intelligence would bring AI to its brand. It was a broken promise, unless Genmoji is to be considered a success. Apple is now saying the new Siri AI will deliver the promises they made back in 2024. Neither iOS 27 nor macOS Golden Gate has been officially released (available only in beta), but this definitely marks the beginning of the full transition toward AI-centrism in consumer OS. The dependency is real now — local or cloud, there’s no opting out.

What we learned from the Fable ban had less to do with LLM capability or whether the technology has finally reached the “singularity”. Fable was a remarkable model in its own right, but its biggest feat is the smudge it left on the American brand image — the place where new tech gets beta-tested — dragging it down to yet another ordinary, boring market. AI services, with their server farms and their headquarters in the US, are at the mercy of US government sanctions. And Fable proved it. There were no checks and balances. No presidential orders or press releases from the White House. Or a bill passed in Congress. It hit one afternoon, and Anthropic was powerless to even voice their defense.

Two major smartphone OS, Android and iOS, are both marketed as AI-driven products. Apple’s current version of iOS is still relying on ChatGPT, but the Siri AI replacing it will be Gemini-based. Android uses Google’s in-house Gemini directly. Imagine a new order hits Gemini — or the distilled version Apple’s using — on the grounds the model could be turned against American interest. A few years of progress, going back to at least 2023, would cease to function overnight. And the ones still in development for the year after would start from scratch.

The hypothetical AI-blackout isn’t limited just to software driven by them. AI-assisted developments would take the first hit. Any active project could at least be paused to look for human replacements — that’s just a matter of paying for people. Pay for artists, writers, coders, the jobs once a team of people would have done together. It’s the active maintenance of already deployed projects that will be hit the hardest. Their budgets have already been downsized, reallocated to pay for AI tokens, and even if they do try to hire more people, there’s no guarantee they’ll fill the gap in time to keep normal operation going.

If anything, it verified an old adage in the tech world — don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Open source models. Regional players. They are the obvious choices. The ones I’m keeping a closer eye on are the copycats. The fast-followers who are only interested in selling to the rest of the world outside of America. They are marketing themselves as the more “reliable” variant of the cutting-edge LLM. The part that stings? The offshoring of reliable infrastructure. The recklessness the US has been smeared with. It will be sold to everyone America has locked itself out of, and American techs would come to use them all the same. The irony doesn’t escape me.