Apple Newsroom, shortly after this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference:

Apple today introduced Siri AI, an entirely new version of Siri, powered by Apple Intelligence. Unfortunately, due to the Digital Markets Act (DMA), Apple will not be able to ship Siri AI in the European Union with the release of iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. Over the past several months, EU regulators did not accept any of Apple’s proposed solutions to bring Siri AI to the EU while safely supporting other virtual assistants.

“We’re deeply disappointed that our EU users won’t have Siri AI on iPhone or iPad when we share our new software releases later this year,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “Our hope is to eventually bring Siri AI to the EU, and we will continue to engage with EU regulators on a path forward. However, their refusal to engage constructively on solutions that preserve privacy and security means we do not currently have a timeline for Siri AI’s availability on iOS and iPadOS in the EU.”

The DMA — or, at least, the European Commission’s interpretation of it — demands Apple allow any external large language model-powered chatbot access to the same information and plugins that Siri AI does. Siri AI has, among many other tools, access to the app toolbox and semantic index to use a person’s personal context and App Intents to personalize responses. Third-party LLM extensions, such as ChatGPT’s existing one, do not have access to these features, as there is no practical way to keep that data on-device if it were offered to third parties.

And yes, Siri AI does support third-party extensions, though they’re (probably intentionally) quite barebones. People can really only just chat to external chatbots through the Siri interface — they can’t do most of the things Siri AI can. The only reason this is even in the operating systems is most likely to stave off regulatory pressure from both the commission and the U.S. government, which filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple during the Biden administration in 2024. But clearly, for the European Union, it isn’t enough. So why isn’t it?

The short answer is that I think the European Union doesn’t know what Apple is even talking about. They’re too decrepit to understand the intention of their law, how Apple is trying to comply with it, and what’s best for consumers. They, frankly, just want Apple to “figure it out.” The commission doesn’t fundamentally understand what on-device inference is, how Private Cloud Compute keeps user data private, and how Apple and OpenAI’s approaches to artificial intelligence differ. I don’t believe they think it’s all the same, but more like they think it’s all just kids playing in the yard. They can’t possibly be bothered with this “nerd stuff.”

Apple does not have access to people’s personal data. It is end-to-end encrypted if they so choose — a feature both the European Union and the United Kingdom have tried to eliminate — and always off-limits if a person decides not to store it in iCloud. Apple could not, even if it wanted to, read someone’s on-device Apple Notes. Siri AI can read those notes because they usually don’t need to be sent to Apple’s servers for processing — the inference is also done on-device. And if the inference does need to be sent to the cloud, it is encrypted in transit, decrypted using a special two-way handshake between the client and the server, and immediately erased the second it leaves the server. Apple could not, even if it wanted to, peek into the server.

By contrast, a request to OpenAI’s servers is very different. None of it is encrypted or on-device. As soon as a person hits Return on a query, it is sent to OpenAI’s servers, stored there for at least 30 days — if not longer — and trained on by default to improve future models. Human reviewers at OpenAI regularly monitor conversations and suspend users’ accounts for terms-of-service violations. Nothing about the ChatGPT experience is private — OpenAI itself tells its users not to share sensitive data with ChatGPT. If Apple gave ChatGPT access to a user’s private, on-device notes, it would be perhaps the biggest privacy scandal of the modern era.

Unlike the original suite of Apple Intelligence features, I truly think Europeans are missing out on something incredible here. Siri AI is the most private, environmentally conscious AI system on the planet. These are not considerations for a place like China — where Apple Intelligence is also unavailable due to regulation — but they seem like they would strongly appeal to Europe’s abundantly liberal politics. I don’t expect protests on the street from angry Belgians or whatever, but Siri AI seems like the first AI system really made for Europeans. I strongly respect Europe’s commitment to regulation, and in some ways, I think Apple does, too. That’s why the European Union’s regulatory action got a whole press release, while China’s only received a footnote. Europe is a liberal democracy worth fighting for.