Apple's Secret ChatGPT Clone Says Everything About Why Siri Still Sucks

Apple built a ChatGPT competitor called Veritas. You'll never use it. Your friends won't use it. Nobody outside Cupertino will ever touch it, because it exists solely to help Apple's engineers figure out how to fix the disaster that is Siri's AI overhaul.

Let that sink in: the company that revolutionized personal computing, reinvented the smartphone, and convinced millions to wear computers on their wrists needs an internal chatbot just to test whether their voice assistant works properly. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Veritas—Latin for "truth," which is either aspirational or ironic—lets Apple employees test Siri features that were supposed to launch in spring 2024 but have been delayed until at least March 2026.

The existence of Veritas isn't innovation. It's damage control wrapped in codenames.

The Feature That Failed One-Third of the Time

Here's what Apple promised last June at WWDC: a Siri that could search your personal data, understand context, and perform actions across apps. The kind of capabilities that ChatGPT, Claude, and Google's Gemini have been demonstrating for years. The features that would finally make Siri feel less like a glorified kitchen timer and more like an actual intelligence.

Then reality hit. Internal testing showed the new features failed approximately one-third of the time. One out of every three attempts resulted in errors, bugs, or outright failures. For context, that's not "beta quality"—that's barely functional prototype territory.

The failure triggered a leadership shakeup. AI chief John Giannandrea and several deputies were sidelined. Robby Walker, who oversaw Siri until the delays, is leaving Apple in October. When your flagship AI project is such a wreck that heads start rolling, you're not experiencing minor technical difficulties—you're admitting fundamental incompetence.

Apple's response? Build an entirely separate app to test the features in isolation, because apparently their existing development infrastructure couldn't handle the complexity. Veritas functions like any other chatbot—multiple conversations, saved chat history, back-and-forth exchanges. The difference is that it exists purely as a quality control mechanism for technology that should have shipped 18 months ago.

The Architecture of Failure

The reason Apple needs Veritas reveals the deeper problem: Siri runs on ancient, brittle architecture that was never designed for modern AI capabilities. According to multiple reports, Apple's initial attempt to graft large language models onto Siri's legacy framework was described by insiders as a "wreck." The old command-and-response system fundamentally doesn't support the kind of fluid, conversational AI that competitors shipped years ago.

So Apple is building new backend infrastructure called "Linwood," combining their own LLM work with third-party models—likely Google's Gemini, because nothing says "we're ahead in AI" quite like licensing your biggest competitor's technology. They're also exploring partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic, essentially admitting they can't solve this problem alone.

The technical debt has real consequences. While Apple scrambles to rebuild Siri's foundation, Google Assistant and Microsoft's Copilot already execute complex multi-step tasks across apps. Amazon's Alexa+ maintains conversations across devices. Even Meta's AI, built into WhatsApp and Instagram, provides more contextually aware responses than Siri manages.

Apple spent years letting Siri stagnate while competitors invested in modern AI architecture. Now they're paying the price, and the cost isn't just technical—it's reputational.

The $150 Billion Question

Here's the uncomfortable math: Apple is valued at roughly $3.5 trillion, making it the world's most valuable company. They committed to a massive AI push that was supposed to drive an "AI supercycle" of iPhone upgrades. Analysts at UBS and Morgan Stanley projected significant device sales driven by Apple Intelligence features.

Instead, those headline features keep getting delayed. First from spring 2024 to fall 2024, then to spring 2025, now to "at least March 2026" according to current timelines. Some advanced capabilities might not arrive until 2027. That's not a development timeline—it's a eulogy for the "AI supercycle" theory.

The iPhone 16 launched with Apple Intelligence branding but without the intelligence to back it up. Customers bought phones expecting capabilities that won't materialize for another year minimum. Some features, like improved natural language understanding and ChatGPT integration, did ship. But the transformative personal context awareness and cross-app actions? Still vaporware.

Apple confirmed the delays with a carefully worded Friday news dump—the classic strategy for burying bad news before the weekend. When a company worth trillions needs to hide behind corporate communications timing, you know the situation is worse than they're admitting publicly.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

The Veritas situation isn't just about Siri being bad. We've lived with bad Siri for years. It's about Apple's fundamental inability to execute on AI despite having essentially unlimited resources, talent access, and market position.

Apple pioneered the modern voice assistant with Siri in 2011. They had a fourteen-year head start. Fourteen years to build the infrastructure, refine the models, create the user experiences. Instead, they let the technology atrophy while focusing on iterative hardware improvements and services revenue.

Now, when AI has become the defining technology battleground of the decade, Apple finds itself playing catch-up with tools like Veritas—internal testing apps that exist solely because their production systems are too broken to develop against directly. That's not innovation, that's desperation disguised as process.

Craig Federighi, Apple's software chief, told reporters in June that chatbots "remain not our primary goal." Which is convenient framing when you're years behind in chatbot technology. When asked about releasing something ChatGPT-like, he said "Time will tell where we go there"—executive speak for "we don't know how to solve this problem yet."

The Broader Implications

Twelve months is an eternity in AI development. Just one year ago, AI image and video generators were impressive parlor tricks. Today, they're creating photorealistic content indistinguishable from human work. By March 2026, when Apple's promised Siri features might arrive, the competitive landscape will have moved three generations forward.

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic—they're not standing still while Apple debugs Veritas. They're shipping multi-modal AI, advanced reasoning capabilities, and deeper OS integration. Apple's delays don't just keep them behind; they widen the gap exponentially.

The real question is whether it even matters. Apple's ecosystem lock-in is so strong that millions will keep buying iPhones regardless of Siri's capabilities. But for how long? When every Android phone ships with genuinely useful AI features while iPhones require workarounds and third-party integrations, how many premium-paying customers will tolerate the gap?

Veritas exists because Apple spent over a decade ignoring Siri while competitors built modern AI architecture. Now they're stuck debugging a voice assistant using a separate app because their production systems are too fragile to test against.

That's not innovation. That's the sound of chickens coming home to roost at $3.5 trillion market cap.

The truth—the real "veritas"—is that Apple had every advantage and squandered it. Now they're rebuilding from scratch while pretending it's all going according to plan. Ask Siri how that's working out, assuming it understands the question.

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