Further lawsuits against Apple due to postponed Siri – New date set

Apple's troubles surrounding the postponed AI functions for its voice assistant Siri continue: following an initial lawsuit in San Jose, which accused Apple of deceiving consumers, among other things, two further lawsuits have now been launched in California and British Columbia, Canada. On a positive note, however, Apple has apparently set a new internal release date for the missing features: According to a report in the New York Times, the new features will now be delivered by fall 2025. This would be faster than the "year" that the company had set itself in a press release for the work.

Lawsuits from the south and the north

The new lawsuit from California against the delayed Siri was filed on Wednesday of this week (Case 5:25-cv-03205, United States District Court of the Northern District of California, San Jose Division). It was filed in the same court as the first lawsuit. If a judge agrees to grant the dispute the status of a class action, it is likely that the lawsuits will be consolidated.

As with the first lawsuit, two consumers are seeking damages from Apple for alleged false advertising. They also claim that the company violated competition law by marketing with Apple Intelligence and Siri upgrades that did not even exist yet. Both consumers say that they would not have bought an iPhone 16 if they had known that the functions were not coming. Apple had previously promised that iOS 18.4 or 18.5 would enable context-sensitive Siri, which can access iPhone data, as well as app control including screen reading. All of this should happen locally and be privacy-friendly. Class action status is also being sought here. Apple Canada is alleged to have engaged in false advertising and misled users. As a result, customers allegedly paid "unlawfully inflated prices" for the iPhone 16. This is also about damages, which could well reach millions in the USA.

New deadline for better Siri

Meanwhile, Apple has tidied up its Siri team and brought the project back on track. Whether this will help remains to be seen. According to the New York Times, the better Siri has at least not been canceled. Features such as the ability to edit and send photos by voice are still in the program. Meanwhile, the problems with the project allegedly started at the beginning of 2023, when AI boss John Giannandrea wanted to buy more AI chips for Siri development.

CEO Tim Cook initially wanted to double the budget, but the then CFO Luca Maestri did not go along with this. Allegedly, only half of the money was approved. Giannandrea is therefore said to have focused on increasing the efficiency of the existing training infrastructure, which took time. Cloud providers such as Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services were also used. Apple reportedly only had 50,000 GPUs at the time, most of which were half a decade old. That was significantly less power than its competitors had. According to the report, there was also trouble between the individual teams – and a battle over who was responsible for the Siri project.

(bsc)