Apple’s AI Delays Lead to False Advertising Lawsuit

Apple has been sued for false advertising due to its delayed artificial intelligence (AI) rollout.

As Axios reported, the proposed class action suit, filed last week in federal court, seeks unspecified damages for customers who purchased Apple products outfitted with the company’s AI capabilities, dubbed “Apple Intelligence.”

“Apple’s advertisements saturated the internet, television, and other airwaves to cultivate a clear and reasonable consumer expectation that these transformative features would be available upon the iPhone’s release,” the suit says.

“This drove unprecedented excitement in the market, even for Apple, as the company knew it would, and as part of Apple’s ongoing effort to convince consumers to upgrade at a premium price and to distinguish itself from competitors deemed to be winning the AI-arms race.”

However, the suit adds, Apple’s products featured “a significantly limited or entirely absent version of Apple Intelligence,” thus misleading consumers. The suit also says Apple advertised its products based on “overstated AI capabilities.”

The lawsuit also notes that Apple has pulled a recent ad campaign touting AI capabilities of its Siri voice assistant from YouTube, but has otherwise “failed to retract all the similarly false representations in the market that began in the summer of 2024.”

PYMNTS has contacted Apple for comment but has not yet gotten a reply.

The suit comes at a time when — as noted here last week — Apple is struggling to catch up to competitors such as Amazon and Google as those companies roll out more advanced AI features.

The company has said that improvements to Siri — originally planned to debut this year — had been pushed back until 2026. Amazon, meanwhile, recently announced Alexa+, an updated version of its home voice assistant that embeds generative and agentic AI.

“It is a remarkable fall from grace for Siri that has culminated in a rare move by Apple: demoting the executive in charge,” PYMNTS wrote.

The executive in question is John Giannandrea, ex-head of search and AI at Google, who had been overseeing Siri’s upgrades before. That job now goes to Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell.

Speaking with PYMNTS earlier this month, Siri co-designer Luc Julia said that an obsession with perfection is likely weighing down efforts to introduce an upgraded Siri.

“They are falling behind because of this fear of not being perfect,” said Julia.