Apple Delays AI Siri in EU: DMA Blocks iOS 27 Feature

Samantha: Welcome to The State of Tech, The European Edition, Tuesday June ninth, 2026. I'm Samantha Lawrence.

Bob: And I'm Bob Russell. Today: Apple delays its new AI Siri in the European Union, blaming the Digital Markets Act. OpenAI preps the biggest ChatGPT overhaul since launch. Canada launches a national AI strategy under Prime Minister Carney. Chipmaker TSMC's market value more than doubles on AI demand. And to close, two things you can actually try today: the note-taking app Obsidian, and the ad blocker uBlock Origin. Let's get into it.

Apple delays its new AI-powered Siri in the European Union, pointing straight at the Digital Markets Act.

Samantha: Apple held its developer keynote yesterday, and the big reveal was a long-awaited overhaul of Siri, deeply tied into what the company is now calling Apple Intelligence. More conversational, more personal context, broader world knowledge, and partly powered by a version of Google's Gemini model. But here is the catch for our listeners: some of those new Siri features will not launch in the European Union when iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 ship. Apple is explicitly blaming the Digital Markets Act.

Bob: And Apple put that in writing, in a newsroom post saying the AI Siri features are delayed in the EU specifically because of the DMA. The argument is that the new Siri reaches deep into other apps, your messages, your calendar, your photos, and the DMA requires Apple to open up those hooks to rival apps and assistants in a way Apple says it cannot yet do safely. So rather than rebuild it for Europe, they are holding it back.

Samantha: This was also Tim Cook's final WWDC keynote. He steps down in September. So a symbolic moment, with Apple effectively saying its next chapter starts under a regulatory cloud in its second-biggest market.

Bob: For European users the practical effect is straightforward and a bit annoying. Buy a new iPhone this autumn in Berlin, Madrid or Amsterdam, and the headline feature, the smarter Siri that understands what is on your screen and can act across your apps, will not be there on day one. Other Apple Intelligence pieces will arrive, but the Siri showpiece is on hold.

Samantha: And this lands right in the middle of an ongoing fight. Brussels says the DMA is doing its job, forcing the biggest tech platforms to open up so smaller European companies can compete. Apple says the rules are written so broadly that it cannot ship its newest features without creating security and privacy risks.

Bob: Critics of Apple point out that the company has used this same line before, with features that eventually did arrive in Europe, just later. Critics of the DMA argue Europeans are now structurally getting tech later than users in the US or Asia, and that this widens the innovation gap.

Samantha: The European Commission has not yet given a formal response to yesterday's announcement. But expect a public exchange in the coming weeks, because this is exactly the kind of high-profile case that defines whether the DMA is seen as protecting users or holding them back.

Bob: One more thing worth noting. The Gemini partnership itself is striking. Apple, famously protective of its stack, is leaning on Google to power parts of its AI. That tells you how hard the AI race has become, even for the company with the deepest pockets in tech.

OpenAI is preparing the biggest ChatGPT overhaul since its 2022 launch.

Samantha: According to the Financial Times, OpenAI is working on the most sweeping redesign of ChatGPT since it launched in late 2022. We are talking about a product that hundreds of millions of people now use weekly, so any major change is felt globally.

Bob: The reporting points to a shift away from the familiar chat box toward something that feels more like a personal assistant that takes initiative. Less typing questions, more ChatGPT proactively helping with tasks, remembering context across conversations, and acting on your behalf across apps and the web.

Samantha: This fits a broader pattern. Every major AI player is racing to turn chatbots into so-called agents, software that does things for you rather than waiting for the next prompt. Booking, summarising, drafting, comparing, even buying.

Bob: For European users this is a double-edged story. On one hand, more capability for the same monthly subscription. On the other, an assistant that reads your mail, remembers your habits and acts in your name raises real questions under the GDPR and the AI Act. The more autonomy, the more sensitive the data trail.

Samantha: And there is a competitive angle. ChatGPT recently crossed a billion monthly users. OpenAI cannot afford to let Google Gemini, Anthropic's Claude or Microsoft Copilot leapfrog it on the assistant experience. So this overhaul is partly product vision, partly defending a lead that is no longer as comfortable as it looked a year ago.

Bob: No firm launch date in the FT report, but the signal is clear. The chatbot era as we have known it for three years is ending. What comes next is messier, more powerful, and a much bigger ask of the trust we place in these systems.

Samantha: Quick interruption. If you listen to The State of Tech regularly, hit that like button and subscribe, that way you'll never miss an episode. Okay, moving on.

Canada launches AI for All, a national strategy under Prime Minister Mark Carney.

Bob: Prime Minister Mark Carney has launched what Ottawa is calling AI for All, Canada's new national artificial intelligence strategy. The announcement, made on the fourth of June, frames AI as central to Canadian productivity, sovereignty and public services.

Samantha: The plan covers research funding, support for Canadian AI companies, rules around safety and transparency, and a push to keep talent inside the country. Canada was an early leader in AI research, the deep learning groundwork came partly out of Montreal and Toronto, but in recent years much of the commercial action has shifted to the United States.

Bob: Carney's pitch is essentially: Canada cannot just be the lab that feeds Silicon Valley. The strategy talks about building national AI infrastructure, more compute on Canadian soil, and clearer guardrails so public trust keeps up with deployment.

Samantha: For Europe this is relevant for two reasons. First, Canada is a natural ally on AI rules. Ottawa and Brussels both lean toward a risk-based approach, in contrast to the lighter-touch US line. Expect more coordination on standards.

Bob: Second, it adds to a global pattern. The UK, France, Germany, the EU as a whole, India, South Korea, and now Canada all rolling out national AI strategies within roughly a year of each other. That is a lot of public money chasing a sector still dominated by a handful of US and Chinese firms.

Samantha: The hard question is whether Canada's strategy is large enough to matter at the frontier. The figures in the announcement are real, but small compared with the hundreds of billions being poured into AI infrastructure south of the border. Industry groups argue much more would be needed to move the needle on frontier models.

Bob: Where it could matter more is in applied AI, healthcare, climate, public administration, where Canada has strong universities and data assets. That is also where European countries see their best shot.

TSMC's market value more than doubles to one point four trillion dollars, lifted by the AI chip boom.

Samantha: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the world's largest contract chipmaker, has seen its market value more than double over the past year, reaching one point four two seven trillion US dollars by the end of March. That moves it from twelfth to ninth in the global ranking of most valuable companies, according to a tally by PwC Taiwan.

Bob: The driver is no mystery. Almost every advanced AI chip on the planet, whether designed by Nvidia, AMD, Apple, Google or Amazon, is physically manufactured by TSMC. As demand for AI hardware has exploded, TSMC has become the chokepoint of the entire industry.

Samantha: For Europe this matters in two ways. First, supply. European carmakers, industrial firms and AI startups all depend, directly or indirectly, on TSMC's factories in Taiwan. Any hiccup there ripples straight into European production lines.

Bob: Second, strategy. The EU Chips Act was meant to bring more advanced manufacturing onto European soil, with TSMC itself building a plant in Dresden together with European partners. But that German factory will produce older-generation chips, not the cutting-edge AI processors that drive this trillion-dollar valuation.

Samantha: So Europe is investing heavily, but the centre of gravity in advanced chipmaking remains firmly in Taiwan. That is a geopolitical exposure as much as an economic one, given the tensions around the Taiwan Strait.

Bob: The valuation jump also tells you something about market psychology. Investors are betting that AI demand is not a passing wave but a multi-year build-out, and that TSMC's role as sole manufacturer of the most advanced chips is close to unassailable in the short term.

Samantha: The risk on the other side is concentration. A single company, in a single location, manufacturing the brains of the global AI economy. Convenient for shareholders, uncomfortable for policymakers in Brussels, Washington and Tokyo alike.

Samantha: To close out, two things you can actually use today. Bob, you take the first one.

Obsidian is the free note-taking app that keeps your notes on your own device.

Bob: First up: Obsidian. It is a free note-taking app for Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone and Android, and the reason to look at it today is simple: your notes live as plain text files on your own device, not in someone else's cloud.

Samantha: That matters more than it used to. With every productivity tool racing to feed your notes into an AI model, Obsidian is one of the few mainstream options where, by default, nothing leaves your laptop unless you choose to sync it.

Bob: The app lets you link notes together, so over time you build something that looks less like a folder of documents and more like a personal Wikipedia. Write a note about a meeting, link it to the people, the project, the client, and a year later you can actually find what you decided.

Samantha: There is a graph view that visualises how your notes connect, which is genuinely useful for anyone who reads a lot, students, journalists, researchers, lawyers, but also handy for plain old project work.

Bob: It is free for personal use. There is a paid sync service if you want your notes mirrored between your phone and laptop with end-to-end encryption, but you can skip that and use Dropbox, iCloud or a USB stick if you prefer.

Samantha: A practical tip to try this afternoon: download Obsidian, create what it calls a vault, basically a folder on your computer, and dump in five notes from your week. Meetings, ideas, a book you are reading. Link them together using double square brackets around a word. Within a couple of days you will see why people get attached to it.

Bob: One caveat. The app has a learning curve. The first hour you will wonder why anyone bothers. By the second week, most people stop wondering.

Samantha: Works on every major platform, the core app is free, and crucially in Europe: no account required, no data leaving your device by default.

uBlock Origin is the free browser extension that blocks ads and scam pop-ups.

Bob: And the second one ties straight into one of today's news stories. Bitdefender warned about sophisticated AI investment scams spreading through ads on Reddit, with fake BBC and Financial Times branding luring people into fraudulent platforms.

Samantha: The single most effective thing a normal user can do against that kind of campaign is install uBlock Origin. It is a free, open-source browser extension that blocks ads, trackers and a long list of known scam domains, before they ever load in your browser.

Bob: It works on Firefox and on Chromium-based browsers like Brave, Edge and Opera. On Google Chrome the classic version has been phased out, so on Chrome you will want the lighter variant uBlock Origin Lite, or you can switch to Firefox or Brave for the full version.

Samantha: Installation takes about thirty seconds. Open your browser's extension store, search for uBlock Origin, click install. That is it. No account, no subscription, no upsell.

Bob: The immediate effect: most sponsored ads on platforms like Reddit, YouTube and news sites disappear. So do many of the pop-ups and redirect chains that the Bitdefender report describes. It is not a magic shield, social engineering still works, but it strips out a huge share of the delivery mechanism.

Samantha: A bonus benefit: pages load faster and your data plan goes further on mobile-tethered laptops, because you are not downloading megabytes of tracking scripts.

Bob: One European-specific note. uBlock Origin is developed by a single volunteer maintainer and is genuinely open source. So unlike some ad blockers that sell so-called acceptable ads slots, this one does not. What you block, stays blocked.

Samantha: Try it this afternoon. If you have older relatives who fall for investment-style ads, install it on their browser too. It is probably the highest-impact, lowest-effort security step you can take in five minutes.

Bob: That's it for today. We covered: Apple delaying its AI Siri in the EU over the Digital Markets Act, OpenAI's planned overhaul of ChatGPT, Canada's new national AI strategy under Mark Carney, TSMC crossing one point four trillion dollars on AI chip demand, and two things to try yourself: the note-taking app Obsidian and the ad blocker uBlock Origin.

Samantha: Want to know more or react? Visit stateoftech.eu or email us at info@doorzetters.net.

Bob: State of Tech, the tech world in 15 minutes.