Apple’s iOS 27 Siri App Will Auto-Delete Your Chats, and May Still Launch as a Beta
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported that the revamped Siri app in iOS 27 will include auto-deleting chat history, letting users choose 30-day, one-year, or indefinite retention, while internal Apple test builds still label the revamped assistant as a beta product.
About three weeks before WWDC 2026, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman published a Power On newsletter that effectively previewed Apple’s biggest AI reveal yet.
Apple’s redesigned Siri, launching as a standalone app in iOS 27, will auto-delete chat history by default, making it the first major AI assistant to treat conversation deletion as a built-in privacy feature instead of a hidden setting.
Accessible through the side button, wake word, or a new “Search or Ask” swipe mode, Siri supports file uploads, persistent conversations, and full chat history similar to ChatGPT or Claude. The reveal sets up WWDC on June 8 as Apple’s most significant software keynote in years.
Why Auto-Delete Is More Than a Privacy Checkbox
Most AI assistants handle conversation history through optional incognito modes that users must actively find and enable. Apple is taking a different position entirely.
As TechCrunch confirmed, the Siri app’s settings panel will feature auto-delete as a first-class option with three tiers: 30 days, one year, or forever, mirroring the retention controls Apple already offers inside iMessage.
The comparison to Messages is deliberate. By tying Siri’s privacy model to a system iPhone users already trust, Apple is arguing that AI conversations should be treated like personal messages, not cloud training data.
As Bloomberg noted, rivals including Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Meta AI store conversations by default unless users opt out. OpenAI ChatGPT offers temporary chats, but only through an all-or-nothing setting.
If shipped as described, Apple’s system would offer the most granular privacy controls of any mainstream AI assistant at launch.
The Beta Label That Says Everything About Where Siri Actually Is
The most revealing detail in Gurman’s report is not the auto-delete feature, but Apple’s internal label for the product itself.
Reports suggest that iOS 27 test builds still classify the redesigned Siri as a beta and include a developer toggle to exit the Siri beta entirely. Gurman wrote that the approach may remain in place not only during developer testing, but even when iOS 27 launches this fall.
That matters because the upgraded Siri was originally planned for iOS 26 in 2025, already a delay from 2024 ambitions.
This delay follows a botched ChatGPT integration that missed OpenAI’s visibility goals, reportedly prompting the startup to review a breach-of-contract lawsuit against Apple.
A beta tag after nearly three years of development signals more than routine caution. It reflects the difficulty of building a conversational AI system that is both significantly smarter than current Siri and reliable enough to uphold Apple’s privacy-first reputation.
Genmoji, Gemini, and What WWDC Will Complete
Gurman’s newsletter also confirmed that iOS 27 will expand Genmoji, Apple’s custom emoji generator introduced in iOS 26, with improved rendering of real people from users’ photo libraries and support for more complex scene compositions.
On the Gemini integration, which will operate through an Extensions Framework allowing users to choose third-party AI models, Apple will process these Siri requests through its own Private Cloud Compute infrastructure rather than routing data to Google’s servers directly.
What Gurman did not confirm is how that infrastructure scales to the full Siri workload, an architectural question Apple is expected to address at WWDC on June 8.
Source: Apple’s New ChatGPT-Like Siri App Will Have Auto-Deleting Chats
