The Fruity Cargo Cult Apple has settled a false advertising lawsuit over its botched 2024 AI feature launch.
For those who came in late, the iPhone maker advertised a “personalised” Siri voice assistant, which it still has not released.
The proposed settlement was filed in the California federal court on Tuesday. It lands as Job’s Mob is expected to show off an AI-enhanced Siri at its developer conference in June.
The $250mn payment, if approved by the judge, would be one of Job’s Mob’s biggest legal settlements. It includes no admission of fault because, naturally, nobody in Cupertino ever admits that the shiny thing was mostly marketing smoke.
The class includes US buyers of the iPhone 16 and some iPhone 15 models. The lawsuit was filed for US iPhone buyers who said Job’s Mob misled them about features expected on their devices.
Those promised features turned out to be “vapourware” and the lawsuit claimed that in 2024 Job’s Mob “promoted AI capabilities that did not exist at the time, do not exist now, and will not exist for two or more years” while trying to shift more iPhones.
Job’s Mob was caught with its pants down by the huge consumer interest in AI that followed OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in 2022. For a company that sells itself as the future, being surprised by the future is never a great look.
The tech giant has not built its own frontier AI models. It has watched top talent get nicked by rivals such as Meta, while suffering rare cock-ups with AI software launches.
In December, Job’s Mob said top AI executive John Giannandrea would leave the company.
In the end, Apple surrendered and partnered with OpenAI in 2024 to plug ChatGPT into the iPhone operating system. That allowed users to send queries to the chatbot through Siri.
A deeper partnership with Google was announced in January. Under that deal, Job’s Mob will build its AI features on Google’s Gemini models and use its cloud infrastructure.
