Apple reportedly made a ChatGPT-clone to test Siri's new capabilities (www.engadget.com)

Apple has built an internal ChatGPT-style app called "Veritas" to prototype the next-generation Siri, Bloomberg reports. The tool — not intended for public release — gives employees a chat interface that can search personal phone data (emails, messages) and take actions inside apps (like editing photos), letting testers quickly evaluate conversational workflows and whether a chatbot format improves Siri’s usefulness. The move follows public delays to Apple’s Siri overhaul and suggests the project is further along than prior incremental updates implied. Technically, Apple plans to deliver the feature set in 2026 using a hybrid stack of its own models plus at least one third‑party model; OpenAI and Anthropic were considered earlier and the company has since been reported to be courting Google. That combination, plus on-device data access and app control, highlights key tradeoffs: richer, chat-driven capabilities versus Apple’s longstanding privacy and polish positioning. For the AI/ML community, Veritas signals Apple is converging on conversational multimodal assistants and hybrid model deployments, and that integration of local data and external LLMs will drive both new UX patterns and renewed questions about data governance, model selection, and system latency.