Apple CEO John Ternus has pushed back against criticism that the company is lagging in artificial intelligence, declaring in a new interview that Apple will "absolutely" use AI in its products but refuses to add features simply to match competitors' marketing.
In an interview with Wired's Steven Levy — his most expansive comments on AI since taking over as CEO at the beginning of September — Ternus acknowledged that opinions about Apple's AI record are plentiful, but said he is comfortable with the company's position. "Everyone has an opinion," he said, adding, "I really like where we're at."
The remarks, reported by TechCrunch and picked up across the industry, land at a delicate moment for Apple. The company has spent two years being described as behind on AI, most visibly because it delayed a far more capable version of Siri — an overhaul that only reached users this summer, years after rivals shipped their own assistant revamps.
'We Don't Want to Ship AI for AI's Sake'
Ternus' core argument is that Apple will judge AI features the same way it judges everything else: by whether they make products people love, not by whether they generate headlines.
"We don't want to ship AI for AI's sake," he told Levy. "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?"
That philosophy explains much of what critics read as timidity. Where competitors rush to brand every feature "AI-powered," Apple has tended to fold machine learning quietly into existing experiences — computational photography, on-device transcription, photo search — and to reserve its public AI push for a smaller number of flagship features under the Apple Intelligence umbrella.
It is also a philosophy with real risks. Investors and analysts have repeatedly questioned whether Apple's cautious approach has left the company flat-footed while OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Meta restructure their entire product lines around generative AI. The delayed Siri overhaul became a symbol of that anxiety, and Apple's stock has periodically sagged on AI skepticism even as its hardware business stayed profitable.
What About an App-Free Future?
Levy pressed Ternus on a scenario that gets at the heart of Apple's business model: agentic AI that could one day make individual apps unnecessary, with assistants completing tasks across a user's device — and, implicitly, collecting the engagement and revenue that apps currently capture.
Ternus didn't dismiss the technology, but he pushed back on the idea that Apple should chase it for its own sake. "That could make life really easy, I suppose," he said, "but the creation of products is a deeply human and personal thing, something that we love to do."
The answer is revealing for what it says about Apple's strategy under its new CEO. Rather than racing to replace the App Store ecosystem with an agent-first interface — a direction some rivals are actively exploring — Ternus is signaling continuity: Apple will adopt agentic capabilities where they genuinely improve its devices, but it has no intention of dissolving its product philosophy into someone else's chatbot paradigm.
A New CEO, the Same Debate
Ternus, formerly Apple's hardware engineering chief, formally took over as CEO in early September, with Tim Cook moving into an executive chairman role. The transition has been closely watched for signals about Apple's AI direction, and the Wired interview is the clearest public statement of Ternus' thinking so far. The interview drew immediate coverage across the business and technology press, a measure of how much weight investors now place on any signal about Apple's AI intentions.
His answer, in effect, is that Apple is not in an AI race at all — at least not the race the industry thinks it is running. The company will "absolutely ... leverage AI" in its new products, he said, but success will be measured by finished products rather than demos, benchmarks or model releases.
Whether consumers and investors accept that framing may determine more of Apple's next few years than any single feature. The company's rivals are shipping AI assistants, agents and subscription tiers at a breakneck pace, and each cycle of comparison renews the question of where Apple's equivalent is. Ternus' bet is that the answer, when it arrives, will look less like a feature checklist and more like the products Apple has always prided itself on — ones where the technology disappears into the experience.
For now, Apple's AI story remains defined more by what it hasn't shipped than by what it has. Ternus' argument is that this will change on Apple's schedule, not the market's. "Did we build something that they really love?" — by his own standard, the company's AI report card is still being written.
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