iOS 27.3 gives iPhones agentic AI powers, but Apple is keeping guardrails intact

With iOS 27.3, Siri will understand personal context, find information and execute some actions across apps, but no liberties for any autonomous task execution

Apple has released the first beta versions of iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, macOS Sequoia 15.3, and visionOS 2.3, marking the initial rollout of its agentic artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities by making an upgraded Siri AI available to developers for third-party app integration.

Apple CEO John Ternus recently said Siri handles more than 2.5 billion daily requests from users (Official photo) (Official Image)

This means developers can leverage Siri AI’s personal context understanding, onscreen awareness, and natural language to bring content and actions into Siri AI using App Intents. Apple CEO John Ternus recently said Siri handles more than 2.5 billion daily requests from users.

There are also new skills for complex requests, which allow apps to integrate specific methodologies by which Siri AI can combine several actions into a single experience. In fact, Siri can find a user’s custom content and perform an app’s custom actions as required. Apple also confirms in its developer documentation that users don’t need to mention a specific app in their request if that app is in the foreground, if there is a Live Activity active, or when a user continues a conversation in the Siri app that includes a mention of that app.

For instance, you could mention the app name once in a Siri conversation or mention the command if that app is already active on the screen. Prompts could include multi-step tasks such as “Hey Siri, find me an economy class flight from New Delhi to Mumbai next Sunday” or “Hey Siri, are the sneakers I liked in XYZ app on sale?”.

In both cases, Siri can find custom content and even send it from one app to another—including looking up contacts in a different messaging app and sending it to them. However, Siri AI will not allow any autonomous task execution such as automated shopping or payments.

“Siri AI, an entirely new version of Siri that is profoundly more capable, conversational, and personal, is designed to be deeply integrated into Apple’s operating systems and the apps people use every day, including the apps from our vast ecosystem of developers. Thousands of developers have already built integrations with Siri to let users ask for directions, manage a to-do list, send a message, or catch up on an audiobook,” said Apple’s developer documentation.

AFM 3 generation, as the foundation

In terms of compute, certain actions will be processed using the Apple Foundation Model 3 (AFM 3) on-device, while certain complex processing will happen on server-side models. The AFM 3 family includes two on-device models and three server-side models.

The on-device models are AFM 3 Core, which has a 3-billion-parameter dense model, and the AFM 3 Core Advanced, which is a 20-billion-parameter natively multimodal model that uses a sparse architecture to activate anywhere between 1-4 billion parameters at a time depending on the request type.

The three server-based models include AFM 3 Cloud which Apple calls a server-side workhorse, optimised for speed, efficiency, and performance, the AFM 3 Cloud Pro for demanding use cases like agentic tool use and complex reasoning, and the ADM 3 Cloud (Image) for image generation and editing, which also unlocks advanced photo-editing tools in the iPhone.

Apple will also bring these advanced Siri AI capabilities to its own apps, including Calendar, Files, Finder, Journal, Mail, Maps, Messages, Music, Notes, Photos, Preview, Reminders, Safari, Shortcuts, and Weather. “Users can do things like find a coffee shop they visited last week or archive files that haven’t been opened in over a year,” Apple explains.

The roadmap

These are the first beta versions of iOS 27.3, iPadOS 27.3, macOS 27.3, and visionOS 27.3. Assuming Apple follows the regular process that takes a beta software through multiple iterations to the final release, expect the consumer versions for the iPhone, iPad, Mac and the Vision Pro, to roll out later next month.

Specifically for the iPhone, iOS 27.3 is also expected to integrate a redesigned Health app, vertical tabs and an adaptive dark mode for Safari, reachability improvements across apps on the foldable iPhone Duo, alongside the Siri AI expansion in scope and language support.