Apple's new chief executive has used his first extended sit-down with Wired's Steven Levy to push back on the premise that his company is losing the artificial intelligence race.
John Ternus, a longtime Apple executive who officially became CEO at the beginning of September, acknowledged that "everyone has an opinion" but insisted: "I really like where we're at." Over the past two years Apple has often been described as behind on AI, especially as it delayed the release of a more powerful version of Siri, which finally launched this summer.
Ternus said Apple is "absolutely going to leverage AI" in new products. Then came the line likely to define his tenure's framing: "We don't want to ship AI for AI's sake. When we're doing it right, people won't have to think about whether it was AI that made this happen or more traditional software. What matters is, did we build something that they really love?"
The agent question
Levy pressed him on the scenario much of the industry treats as the real risk: agents becoming capable enough that apps stop being products in their own right. Ternus's answer was philosophical rather than defensive. "That could make life really easy, I suppose, but the creation of products is a deeply human and personal thing, something that we love to do."
According to Levy's account, Ternus also said his predecessor, Tim Cook, is "available to help wherever I ask" — particularly on policy — and that Ternus has not yet met with President Trump.
What the phrasing is doing
Apple's strategy has for years pointed at invisible AI: features buried in software and silicon rather than a chat window sold as a product. That fits the company's culture, but it also has a hard commercial logic. Apple sells hardware to hundreds of millions of people who do not follow model leaderboards; a feature that advertises its model can draw more attention to that model's limits than to the device.
The trade-off is real. If agents do become the interface, competition shifts from apps to whichever layer actually executes tasks — precisely where Apple has moved slowest for two years. "I really like where we're at" is a chief executive's line, not a benchmark. How much of Apple's position rests on integration and custom silicon, and how much on an assistant that is only now catching up, will be settled when the next Siri generation is measured against rival agents rather than against its own predecessor.
