Last month, Apple rolled out its long-awaited AI chatbot, dubbed Siri AI. The launch comes at a time when investors see AI as a must-have offering, while consumers are increasingly cautious about the effects that artificial intelligence will have on their lives and society at large.
As AI backlash mounts, it is the latter group who may be the least interested in—or most distrustful of—the new Siri AI.
Siri AI is built on top of Google’s Gemini foundational models and is available on every iPhone 15 Pro and later running iOS 27. It is an ever-present chatbot and assistant that has indexed all the data on your iPhone and can understand what is displayed on your iPhone’s screen—and what you are doing with the device.
The good news is that if the new Siri AI doesn’t appeal to you, Apple has done something with it that other chatbot giants haven’t: built in a kill switch. Here’s how to use it, and what happens if you do.
What exactly happens if you disable Siri AI?
Before you understand what happens when you disable Siri AI, it helps to know how it differs from Apple Intelligence.
Simply put, Apple Intelligence is the underlying artificial intelligence platform built into iOS. It provides system-wide AI features, such as generative writing tools, visual object recognition, and image generation across various apps. Siri AI, introduced in iOS 27, is an agent—a chatbot like ChatGPT—powered by and running on top of Apple Intelligence.
Siri AI has on-device access to your emails, messages, and other data, which can help it answer and carry out your highly personalized queries and commands (such as “Find that restaurant name that mom texted me about last month”). It can also pull real-time information from the web, such as stock quotes or news updates. Any conversation you have with Siri AI can be accessed in the new Siri chatbot app.
If you do choose to flip the Siri AI kill switch, you should understand that you aren’t shutting down Apple’s entire Apple Intelligence platform on your iPhone. Apple Intelligence will still be running in the background, which means AI features like generative writing tools, AI photo editing tools, and image generation tools will still work across the OS—and no, you can’t shut these off.
But you can shut off the new Siri AI agent. When you do that, Apple says you will lose the ability to carry out new conversations or continue existing ones with the Siri AI chatbot, though your old conversations will remain in the app. You won’t be able to issue voice commands to Siri (such as “Hey Siri, turn on my bedroom lights”). And the iPhone’s built-in Visual Intelligence feature, which lets your iPhone recognize objects and places in images, will be more limited.
How to use the kill switch
If you want to disable the new Siri AI agent on your iPhone, Apple makes it pretty easy:
- Open the Settings app.
- Tap Siri.
- Tap Turn Off Siri.
- Tap the blue Turn Off Siri button.
Once you’ve done this, Siri AI will be disabled on your iPhone. However, as noted, Apple Intelligence-powered features, such as those in the Image Playground app, the AI editing tools in the Photos app, and the AI writing tools across myriad apps, will continue to work.
Should you flip the kill switch?
Recently, the internet has been full of headlines about frontier AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta going rogue and hacking into third-party systems. This has, understandably, fueled a distrust of AI and exacerbated “What if AI takes over my device?” fears.
But when it comes to Siri AI going rogue, Apple’s agent is nowhere near as capable as those frontier models. Apple has also sandboxed Siri AI, meaning that you need to explicitly grant it access to various parts of your iPhone, such as individual apps. Without being granted access, Siri AI can’t read or use the data —and if you want to revoke Siri AI’s access to a previously granted app, you can do that by going to Settings > Siri > App Access.
Still, if you have no intention of using Siri AI, there’s little reason to leave the agent enabled. Disabling it might even help you eke out a few more minutes of battery life between charges.
The good news is that disabling Siri AI isn’t permanent. If you’re leery about AI and want it off your iPhone for now (as much as is possible, anyway), you can do that by following the steps above. But if you later decide you want Siri AI back, you can simply return to the Siri settings in the Settings app and tap “Turn On Siri” to get Apple’s new AI agent back up and running.