Apple Inc. has announced it cannot launch its redesigned Siri AI digital assistant on iPhones and iPads within the European Union, marking the latest regulatory standoff between the company and EU antitrust authorities.
During this year's Worldwide Developers Conference, the company unveiled three major AI technology upgrades. The first is a significantly enhanced Apple Intelligence 2.0, which offers substantial improvements over last year's 1.0 version, featuring major leaps in system-level AI assistant capabilities, including new cross-application context understanding and multi-turn conversation functions. The second is an on-device large language model technology; Apple demonstrated a 70-billion-parameter model that can run directly on iPhones, enabling most AI features to operate offline, balancing privacy protection with low-latency interaction. The third is an AI toolkit for developers; Apple concurrently released a series of API interfaces, allowing third-party developers to integrate Apple Intelligence capabilities into their own applications, further expanding the implementation landscape for the AI ecosystem.
In a statement issued on Monday, Apple stated it had proposed a tailored solution for the EU designed to bring Siri AI into compliance with the EU's Digital Markets Act while protecting user privacy by limiting the data the virtual assistant can access. However, over the past several months, the European Commission has not accepted any of the proposed solutions. Consequently, Siri AI will not be available on the EU market with the releases of iOS 27 or iPadOS 27.
A representative for the European Commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside of regular business hours. This represents Apple's latest act of resistance against EU efforts to curb the market influence of large technology firms. Last year, Apple voiced opposition to multiple rules within the Digital Markets Act, including provisions allowing third-party payments and downloading apps from alternative app stores.
The European Commission had previously stated it would not repeal or amend the Digital Markets Act due to Apple's complaints, which subsequently forced Apple to make corresponding adjustments for its EU users.
Earlier on Monday, the iPhone maker released a redesigned, more powerful version of Siri. This feature can answer questions by accessing data from a user's screen content, messages, emails, and photos.
Apple stated that, under what it describes as an "extreme interpretation" of the Digital Markets Act by EU regulators, the company would be required to grant any virtual assistant direct access to users' private data "without the necessary safeguards to protect user privacy and security."
In the statement, Craig Federighi, Apple's Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, said, "The regulators' refusal to engage in constructive dialogue on solutions that protect privacy and security means we cannot currently provide a timeline for launching Siri AI on iOS and iPadOS in the EU. We remain hopeful of eventually bringing Siri AI to the EU market and will continue to communicate with EU regulators to find a path forward."
Apple indicated that Siri AI was made available to developers for testing on Monday and will be released in a beta version to users in English later this year. Furthermore, EU users will still be able to use Siri AI features in subsequent operating system versions for Mac, Vision Pro, and Apple Watch.
The company also stated that Siri AI will not be launched in China until the local regulatory compliance process is completed.
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