Being best in class for on-device AI is a huge market opportunity. Trying to do it all would be dumb like launching Safari without a google search homepage partnership.
Apple can focus on what they are good at which is on device stuff and blending AI into their whole UX across the platform, without compromising privacy. And then taking advantage of a market leader for anything requiring large external server farms and data being sent across the wire for internet access, like AI search queries.
If the system doesn't say "I'm gonna phone a friend to get an answer for this", it's going to stay either 100% local or at worst 100% within Apple Intelligence, which is audited to be completely private.
So if you're asking for a recipe for banana bread, going to ChatGPT is fine. Sending more personal information might not be.
You know what it's really reminiscent of? The EU cookies legislation. Do you like clicking "Yes I accept cookies" every single time you go to a new website? It enhances your privacy, after all.
Think about it: even a government agency isn't able to produce a simple static web page without having to display that cookie banner. If their definitions of "bad cookies that require a banner" is so wide that even they can't work around it to correctly inform citizens, without collecting any private data, displaying any ad or reselling anything; maybe the definition is wrong.
For all intent and purposes, there is a cookie banner law.
Someone somewhere figured out that it might be a good idea and others just copied it.
I want to use perplexity from siri too!
More specifically "is openai seeing my personal data or questions?" A: "No, unless you say it's okay to talk to OpenAI everything happens either on your iPhone or in Private Compute"