Apple settles Siri AI delay lawsuit

Apple will pay $250 million to settle a US class action accusing the company of overselling AI upgrades to Siri ahead of iPhone 16-era launches, according to TechCrunch citing the Financial Times. The deal covers customers who bought an iPhone 15 or iPhone 16 between June 10 2024 and March 29 2025, with payments that could reach $95 per device. Apple does not admit wrongdoing, but it is choosing a cheque over a trial.

The complaint targets a familiar pattern in consumer tech: hardware ships on schedule, while the most marketable software features arrive later, in smaller pieces, or not at all. Plaintiffs argue Apple’s Apple Intelligence campaign created the impression that a substantially upgraded Siri — closer to chatbot-style assistants such as ChatGPT or Claude — would be available sooner than it was. If that claim holds, the economic harm is not that users lacked an optional feature for a few months; it is that Apple captured sales at the moment of purchase, when switching costs are lowest and marketing is loudest.

The settlement also lands just before Apple’s developer conference season, when the company typically refreshes the story of what the platform will soon be able to do. In practice, Siri’s transformation is hard because it sits inside legacy expectations: it must be fast, private, safe, multilingual, and embedded across devices, while also behaving like a modern large-language-model interface. The lawsuit’s existence suggests that the bottleneck is not only model quality, but the gap between what can be demoed and what can be supported at scale on consumer hardware with predictable failure modes.

TechCrunch notes the upgraded Siri experience has been rumoured to rely on Google’s Gemini, and newer reporting suggests Apple may allow users to choose among third-party large language models in a future iPhone OS. That kind of modularity can reduce the risk of being stuck with a single underperforming model, but it also turns Siri into a routing layer — deciding which vendor answers which request — with commercial and privacy implications that are harder to explain in a 30-second ad.

For now, the most concrete output of Apple Intelligence’s early marketing push is a settlement formula: a defined purchase window, an eligibility test, and a capped payout for a feature that was advertised as a reason to buy.