Apple may add AI search to Safari, Eddy Cue tells courts
Apple VP Eddy Cue told the US courts that Apple is “actively looking” at putting AI search tools inside Safari, even as he confirmed that Safari searches declined in April.
Is Apple going on an AI Safari?
This big new follows years in which the company has had its own search bot trawling the web to inform Apple’s existing built-in Spotlight search tool. The existence of the Applebot has spawned many years of speculation the company may one day introduce its own search service to compete with Google’s, but it never has done so. It looks like it may not do so yet – but may work with an AI partner.
Appearing today to testify in the US case against Google, Eddy Cue, Apple’s SVP Services, said the company is exploring AI search as an option in Safari. As reported by Bloomberg, the company hadn’t felt AI search had gotten good enough yet, but this may have changed and the company may add AI search as an option in Safari.
He also said that Perplexity AI and Anthropic could be options; the latter an interesting admission given recent claims Apple may use Anthropic’s Claude to add AI to Xcode. But Cue also said Apple is impressed with what Perplexity can do. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told the same court that he expects to reach a deal with Appe to put Google’s Gemini AI device in iPhones, and ChatGPT is already there.
What about the money?
There could be smoke and mirrors to this, of course. Apple takes a big chunk of cash from Google in exchange for using Google search as default search service in Safari. That is thought to be around $20b, and Cue’s testimony suggested that the loss of that impact would have a big impact on the Safari team. He also said he’s personally lost sleep worrying about the possibility.
Why did Apple work with Google? Cue explained: “We were never interested in doing a search engine because we were very happy partnering with someone. We can’t do everything, so we have to choose the things that we do.”
What keeps you up at night?
A series of Tweets (or whatever you call them now) from Khushita Vasant reveal the extent to which Apple’s senior executives are concerned at the impact of litigation and AI. “We’re not an oil company. We’re not a toothpaste company. These are things that are going to last forever,” Cue said. “People are going to need toothpaste 20 years from now. 40 years from now, people may not need an iPhone…”
“I worry about this. We’re highly successful. That doesn’t mean we’re going to be around 10 or 20 years down the line,” he added.
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