It remains to be seen if Apple’s new Siri is really any good at all. And it remains to be seen what Apple will do for Europe, which right now won’t get the new Siri on either iPhone or iPad. It also remains to be seen how far Apple will actually go in the future. But what we can pretty definitely say right now is that Apple just went agentic.
And that’s a pretty big step.
Among the many updates in Monday’s Apple Intelligence release is a feature in the Passwords app that fixes weak and compromised logins “with just a tap.” Check how Apple describes the mechanics and the word that jumps out is one the company has spent two years carefully avoiding. Passwords now uses Apple Intelligence and Safari, in Apple’s own phrasing, “to agentically take action on a user’s behalf,” securely navigating through websites to sign in and upgrade your accounts on its own.
Agentically. Which means Siri is now an AI agent.
There’s a bit more too. Here’s the full list:
- Passwords auto-upgrade: Siri navigates websites, signs in, and changes weak/compromised passwords for you.
- Safari Notify Me: you ask it to watch a page; it monitors over time and alerts you to restocks, price drops, etc.
- Describe a Shortcut: you describe a goal, Siri assembles the workflow steps on your behalf.
- Triggered Shortcuts automations: event-driven actions like setting tomorrow’s alarm from your calendar, or porch lights on when food delivery arrives.
- Siri app actions: take action across apps: draft an email, edit and share a photo set, add a recipe to Notes.
- Siri mode in Camera: point and act: split a bill via Apple Cash, add calendar events from a poster.
- Mail suggestions: can take action with third-party apps.
- Describe an Extension: generates a working Safari extension from a sentence.
- Calendar describe-an-event: creates/modifies events from a natural-language description (IDs contacts, locations, title).
- Write with Siri: generates a draft from scratch and revises on command.
- Image Playground: modifies images from a described edit.
Of course, there’s some caveats. Some cold water on the hype.
First: nearly all of this is agentic with a human in the loop, not autonomous. Passwords only acts with a tap. Messages offers one-tap suggestions. Notify Me notifies you so you can take action. Apple is being fairly deliberate here … everything runs on-device or through Private Cloud Compute, routed by what it calls a system orchestrator pulling from the Spotlight index and an “App Toolbox.”
This is kind of agentic behind glass: confirmation-gated, privacy-walled, slower by design. Whether that’s patience or timidity depends on how the betas actually perform.
Second, and you knew this was coming: the marquee Siri capabilities — personal context, onscreen awareness, real app actions — are the same ones Apple demoed at WWDC 2024 and then pulled when they didn’t work. Hopefully, today is different: some of it is shipping to developers today, with a user beta “later this year.”
So: full implementation is still in the future.
Tier one agentic operations are passwords upgrading on their own. This is absolutely huge. We’ve all seen it, if we’re using iOS: you have hundreds of passwords out of date. But fixing them all is incredibly tedious, so you kind of hope and pray, maybe fixing some of the most common. Tier one is also Safari’s notify me feature, describe a shortcut – which is essentially vibe coding – and triggered automations.
Tier two agentic operations include app actions, Siri mode in the camera app, mail reaching into other apps, and so on. And Tier three – the least agentic – are the calendar related, write with Siri and image playground options.
“Siri AI can help users take action across apps more naturally than ever,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s software chief.
The operative phrase there is take action. After years of Siri being a glorified timer-setter – yes, probably my most-used Siri action – the pitch is now that you tell it what you want and it goes and does the thing across your apps: draft an email from scratch, edit and share a set of photos, pull a recipe into Notes after you’ve brainstormed a party or get-away.
One of the most interesting agentic actions is in Safari. Notify Me will let you ask Safari, in plain language, to watch a web page and ping you when something changes: a restock, a price drop, a ticket availability notice. You state the intent once; Safari watches in the background and tells you when to act. That’s delegation across time, which is the part of the agentic story that’s genuinely new for Apple.
The assistant isn’t waiting for your next command. It’s doing work for you.
Now we’ll wait and see how far Apple will go here … and how much this will change our experience of the Apple computing ecosystem.
