Alphabet won’t talk about the Google-Apple AI deal, even to investors

Alphabet declined to answer one of its investors during questions about Google’s AI deal with Apple on Wednesday’s fourth-quarter earnings call. Instead of responding to an analyst’s question about how the tech giant is thinking about AI partnerships, such as the one with Apple to power AI for Siri, the question was completely ignored.

That decision tells us something, though — Alphabet isn’t ready to talk about how this partnership will impact its core business, which is increasingly focused on AI.

Over the years, the Google-Apple relationship has been mutually beneficial. The two companies’ search partnership saw the search giant paying the iPhone maker $20 billion to be the default search engine on Apple devices, filings from the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against the search giant revealed. In turn, Google gained access to Apple’s massive customer base — the iPhone maker last quarter announced it has 2.5 billion active devices worldwide, to give you an idea of scale.

The latest Apple AI deal is rumored to cost Apple roughly $1 billion per year, but the payoff beyond that for Google isn’t as immediately obvious as it is with search. In Google Search, consumers see links to advertisers’ websites at the top of their search results. Ads in AI Mode, which could one day represent the future of Google’s search business, are still an “experiment” for now.

The company first announced last May that it would bring ads to AI Mode, the chatbot-style interface for Google Search, but these tests see the ads’ placement below or integrated into the chatbot’s responses. Google is also trying out agentic shopping, including Shop with AI Mode, to guide consumers with product-related queries to a seamless checkout experience from the AI interface.

Meanwhile, Google’s AI competitor Anthropic is taking aim at ad-supported AI with its forthcoming Super Bowl ad, which challenges the business model being adopted by ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Google.

How this will all play out longer-term is still an open question — and for today, an unanswered one, apparently.

Overall, the Apple Siri deal barely received any mention during Alphabet’s earnings call on Wednesday. Sundar Pichai only noted he was pleased that Apple’s “preferred cloud provider” and would be helping to develop “the next generation of Apple foundation models based on Gemini technology.” Google’s Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler used the exact same wording when mentioning Apple, as well.