Apple is a has-been. Anthropic is best positioned to take up the privacy mantle, and may even be forced to, given that most of their revenue is enterprise and B2B.
I hope there's some layer between Apple and Gemini but only those at the helm can be trusted to make that happen and I don't trust them to choose users over the dollar.
In the press release Apple said they will be running this on their own hardware (both on-device and private cloud). They're not going to be directly routing requests to Gemini hosted by Google.
This obviously doesn't preclude some kind of data sharing arrangement, but there is at least some indirection between the two.