Siri AI doesn’t suck, which is a minor miracle. But new reporting from the Wall Street Journal suggests Apple is feeling itself so much that it’s in talks with news publishers to form licensing deals that allow it to deliver up-to-the-minute information via its AI-powered voice assistant. If reading this gives you a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach but you can’t remember why, it’s because Apple tried something similarly ambitious, and the ensuing disaster left a big scar. Apple’s news notification summaries now carry a big, red warning because of what happened in late 2024 and early 2025. The incident you probably remember was the time Apple’s news notification summaries claimed that the BBC had reported that accused insurance executive assassin Luigi Mangioni had shot himself. He hadn’t.
The issue was that Apple Intelligence had shipped with a notification summaries feature. Apple Intelligence was using AI to condense texts and other communications like Slack messages, but it was also taking the liberty of compressing the personalized news alerts an individual user was seeing on their phone—ostensibly into bite-sized nuggets that could be consumed at a glance. But it was sometimes mangling the truth. Worse: it was claiming that credible news outlets were the ones mangling the truth.
