Apple’s Testimony Wipes Out $150 Billion From Google Amid New AI Model Launch

In a bid to improve its artificial intelligence (AI) offerings, Google recently released a new model—Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview (I/O edition).

The new model is an upgraded version of the previously launched Gemini 2.5 Pro model, which is a part of the Gemini 2.5 family. It comes as the company “decided to release an updated version a couple of weeks early to get into developers' hands sooner.”

While its predecessor was already adept at coding, the new release improves on that, bringing in even stronger coding capabilities, improving front-end and UI development, fundamental coding tasks, transforming and editing code, and agentic workflows.

The early release comes as the company gives developers a taste of what’s to come, days ahead of the Google I/O event, which is scheduled from May 20 to 21, 2025, and is expected to focus on Google’s AI, Android, Web, and Cloud developments.


It’s not uncommon for AI companies to release new models every now and then, especially considering AI is seeping into almost every digital product. In fact, it's becoming common practice for them to consistently release new platforms or update their current offerings to ensure they stay relevant in the AI race, let alone lead it.

Even Google’s flagship product and breadwinner—its search engine—is integrating AI into the process. AI Overviews offers short, concise responses that enable users to quickly understand information from a range of sources using generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) capabilities.

However, current trends find users flocking to dedicated AI apps for their search requirements—something that Apple’s SVP of Services, Eddy Cue, agrees with.

As part of the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Google, Cue confirmed that Apple is actively looking for AI-powered search engines to replace Google’s as the default option on its Safari browser, across iPhones, iPads, and other Apple devices.

Apple also reported a decline in the number of searches conducted by Safari users for the first time last month, who are believed to have moved to AI platforms instead. This led to Cue’s take that AI-driven search platforms to replace traditional search engines, including Google’s, while the shifting tide is expected to influence Safari’s future development too. Google, though, noted continued growth in the overall number of search queries.

Apple already uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT as a feature within Siri and to power Apple Intelligence in iOS 18. It’s also set to bring Google’s Gemini soon, a move that also saw Apple evaluate the capabilities of Anthropic, Perplexity, Grok, and DeepSeek.

Cue also spoke about the rapid pace of innovation in technology, one that could even see the iPhone being rendered obsolete.

“You may not need an iPhone 10 years from now as crazy as it sounds,” he said.


However, several experts are saying that some of Cue’s statements are meant to easy the U.S. DoJ’s scrutiny on Google in its antitrust case—which includes Google establishing an illegal monopoly in the search engine market—as Apple earns around $20 billion per year from Google to remain the default search engine on Safari.

This could also spell danger for Google, as a large part of its advertising business relies on iPhone users leveraging its search engine. Google’s payments to Apple are said to be around 36% of its advertising revenue from the browser. Interestingly, one of the remedies the DoJ is opting for is banning Google from paying companies to keep Google as their default search engine.

Cue noted that even if Apple were to strike another default deal, Google would remain the best service available. Meaning Apple would anyway opt for it, but could lose their earnings from the deal—one that could affect Apple’s ability to create new products. The possibility of losing the deal is a scenario Cue said he’s “lost a lot of sleep” over.

Even Mozilla chipped in by saying its Firefox browser could go extinct without its deal with Google. Reportedly, Firefox accounts for around 90% of Mozilla’s revenue.

Either way, the entire ordeal saw Alphabet’s shares slide approximately 10% or $15 per share, going from around $165 to $150, representing a wipeout of roughly $150 billion.

It even slid one position in the rankings for largest companies by market capitalization, going from #4 to #5.

On the flip side, Apple’s stock also fell 1.1%

Do you think Google’s search engine domination is under threat?

Let us know in the comments below!