Apple AI chief exits
Apple’s senior AI executive John Giannandrea is leaving the company after delays to Apple Intelligence, with responsibilities redistributed to other execs, a development flagged on X earlier this week. (x.com) (x.com).
John Giannandrea, the Apple executive hired to fix Siri and lead its artificial intelligence work, is leaving the company this week after an eight-year run. (apple.com) Apple said on December 1, 2025 that Giannandrea was stepping down as senior vice president for Machine Learning and AI Strategy, shifting to an adviser role before retiring in spring 2026. The company named Amar Subramanya vice president of artificial intelligence, reporting to software chief Craig Federighi. (apple.com) Apple also split up Giannandrea’s old organization. Subramanya took Apple Foundation Models, machine learning research, and artificial intelligence safety and evaluation, while “the balance” moved to operations chief Sabih Khan and services chief Eddy Cue, Apple said. (apple.com) The reshuffle started months earlier, on March 20, 2025, when Apple moved Siri out of Giannandrea’s control and put Mike Rockwell, the executive behind Vision Pro, in charge of the assistant. Rockwell began reporting to Federighi, not to Giannandrea. (bloomberg.com) That change came days after Apple delayed the Siri upgrade it had shown at Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2024: a version meant to understand personal context and take actions across apps. Apple said on March 7, 2025 that those features would take longer than expected and would arrive “in the coming year.” (daringfireball.net) Apple Intelligence itself did ship in stages. Apple released its first public set of features on October 28, 2024, including Writing Tools, notification summaries, image cleanup, and a more conversational Siri. (apple.com) But the product Apple used to market the iPhone 16 was broader than what shipped in 2024. Apple’s September 2024 iPhone 16 announcement said the phones were “designed specifically for Apple Intelligence,” tying the new lineup closely to the company’s artificial intelligence push. (apple.com) Giannandrea arrived at Apple in 2018 from Google, where he had led search and artificial intelligence work, and became one of the company’s most prominent outside hires. By late 2025, Apple was publicly crediting Federighi with overseeing the effort to deliver a “more personalized Siri” the following year. (apple.com) His exit closes the chapter in which Apple tried to centralize its artificial intelligence effort under one senior executive. The company is now betting on a more distributed structure, with Federighi, Subramanya, Rockwell, Cue, and Khan handling pieces of the work Giannandrea once ran. (apple.com)
