Siri has come free with every iPhone since 2011. The rebuilt version is now rolling out, and Apple says there will be a daily limit on how much of it an owner can use, with a fee for going past it.

Apple began rolling out Siri AI on Monday as an English-language beta. Owners join a waitlist in Settings , and Apple says it will notify them when the new Siri is available on their phone. The same announcement sets out the limits.

“Certain Apple Intelligence features that rely on server-side models are subject to daily usage limits, including but not limited to Siri AI, intelligent photo editing tools, Image Playground, and AFM 3 Cloud models in Shortcuts.”

Increased access, according to Apple’s support page , “will be available for a fee.” Apple says a feature that reaches its limit becomes available again after a timeout. It has not published the size of the limits or the price, and the same page describes the limits as coming in the future.

The iPhone 18 reaches stores this week . So why would Apple limit the new Siri in the same week?

The new Siri can pull details from a user’s messages, emails and photos, take actions inside apps and answer questions from the web. That work runs in one of two places. Lighter tasks are handled by the chip inside the iPhone, and heavier requests go to servers through a system Apple calls Private Cloud Compute.

Apple’s support page lists Siri AI among the features that depend on those servers. It says the limits “may vary by feature, request complexity, system demand, system policies, and other factors,” and that they exist to keep the experience reliable for everyone.

Some of those servers are in Google’s cloud. Apple said in June that its most powerful model, AFM 3 Cloud Pro, runs on Nvidia chips hosted in Google’s cloud and is meant for its most demanding tasks, such as complex reasoning. The fine print Apple posted on September 9 includes that model, used through the Shortcuts automation app, among the limited features.

Apple pays for the chip in each phone once, when the phone is built, and it pays for the servers behind the new Siri every time a request needs them.

Apple says it built its new models in collaboration with Google and its Gemini models. Google’s own Gemini app already runs on limits.

On Google’s help page , the limits refresh every five hours, up to a weekly ceiling. Users without a paid plan get the standard amount, Google AI Plus doubles it, AI Pro quadruples it, and Ultra goes to five or 20 times the Pro level. The more someone pays, the more they can ask.

Google says it may change the limits when activity in the app jumps, and that some features may be unavailable to users without a plan during periods of high demand. Apple’s plan follows the same design as its model partner’s: a free allowance, more for people who pay, and the right to change both.

Apple has never charged for Siri, and it has not said how the new fee will be sold. Its subscriptions, from iCloud storage to Apple Music, are part of its Services business.

In the June quarter, Services brought in $30.7 billion , up 12% from a year earlier, and cost $7.5 billion to deliver. Apple kept about 76 cents of every Services dollar after those direct costs, and about 40 cents of every hardware dollar. A Services dollar is worth almost twice as much to Apple as a hardware dollar.

Services made up 28% of Apple’s sales that quarter and 42% of its profit after direct costs. Sold like Apple’s other subscriptions, a fee for more Siri would add revenue to the part of the company that keeps the most of every dollar.

The Same-Day Chip Selloff

Apple’s rollout landed on the day the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 5.9% and Nvidia dropped 3.4%. The index tracks the largest chip stocks, and the selling followed calls from the heads of Anthropic and OpenAI to slow the pace of AI development, which Elon Musk backed.

Investors sold chipmakers as if a slower pace meant fewer chips. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s essay says pacing does not mean halting model training or technical progress.

Apple’s announcement points the other way. A fee for more access is aimed at owners who want more than the daily limit, and every extra request runs on a server someone had to build and pay for.

On the day investors sold chipmakers over talk of slowing AI, Apple told iPhone owners that more AI will cost extra.

Apple has not said how big the limits are or what the fee will be. Those two numbers will show how much Apple thinks people will pay for a Siri that can do more.

Owning Apple for the iPhone now also means owning a company that plans to charge for AI on top of it.

Own Apple for that. Own Nvidia too, because its chips are the ones Apple chose for its most demanding AI requests, and Monday’s selloff in chipmakers is a better price on the same demand.

A company getting ready to charge for more AI is not planning for less of it.