A few months before Apple takes the stage at WWDC, something quietly telling is happening behind the scenes.
Apple is shipping a large chunk of its Siri engineering team off to a multi-week bootcamp, where they’ll learn to write code using AI tools. Yes, the company developing an AI assistant is now training its own people to actually use it.
The timing alone is worth noting. WWDC is just around the corner, and Apple is widely expected to show off a smarter, overhauled version of Siri. That makes the moment right now a curious time to pull engineers out of the building for training.
While the bootcamp runs, about 60 members of the Siri team will keep development moving, and another 60 will focus specifically on testing the assistant’s performance.
Apple wants to know Siri can safely interpret and carry out what users ask of it before it shows anything off publicly.
So why does this bootcamp even need to exist? Coding with AI has become the norm across most of the tech industry, but the Siri team apparently hasn’t kept up.
Some Apple teams have committed serious budget to tools like Claude Code, yet the Siri team has quietly earned a reputation inside Apple for being behind the curve.
That reputation comes with context. The team was unable to deliver the upgraded, Apple Intelligence version of Siri that Apple had publicly promised for iOS 18.
The fallout reshaped Apple’s entire AI leadership structure. John Giannandrea, who had led Apple’s AI efforts, stepped down late in 2025 and officially retired this week after his final stock vesting landed on April 15.
Craig Federighi, Apple’s software engineering chief, stepped in to lead AI development. Mike Rockwell, the executive behind the Vision Pro, now heads the Siri team directly.
Under Federighi’s watch, Apple also struck a deal with Google to bring Gemini models into Siri and other AI features across its platforms.
It’s a lot of change, and the bootcamp might be the clearest signal yet that Apple knows the Siri team needs a reset.
Is sending engineers to an AI bootcamp a smart reset or a sign that something is seriously broken at Apple?
