Apple on Tuesday agreed to pay $250 million to settle legal claims that it misled consumers about the capabilities of its Apple Intelligence artificial intelligence system, according to court filings.
The settlement resolves a handful of class-action lawsuits filed against Apple last year that alleged the company oversold what its product could do during its 2024 launch. Those lawsuits were consolidated last year by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where the settlement still has to be approved by a judge.
Consumers who purchased the iPhone 16 and select iPhone 15 models between June 2024 and March 2025 will be eligible to withdraw up to $95 per device, according to the filing. As part of the settlement, Apple denied any wrongdoing.
The settlement underscores Apple’s challenges in the global tech race to dominate AI. Tech companies like Microsoft and Nvidia have soared as they bet heavily on the technology.
“Since the launch of Apple Intelligence, we’ve introduced dozens of features in multiple languages that are integrated across Apple platforms,” Marni Goldberg, an Apple spokeswoman, said in a statement. “We have resolved this matter so that we can continue to focus on what we do best to deliver the most innovative products and services to our users.”
Apple first teased Apple Intelligence in June 2024 as a response to products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The company has promised major improvements to its personal assistant Siri, which has been a part of its devices for more than a decade.
Apple also said it plans to introduce artificial intelligence features that would summarize notifications and offer help to improve typing in emails and text messages. In commercials, actor Bella Ramsey used Apple Intelligence to remember someone’s name and capture an email.
But those features weren’t available on the iPhones that Apple shipped in September 2024. Instead, the company gradually rolled out the promised features and soon ran into trouble. For example, notification summaries incorrectly presented messages and Apple disabled this feature. In March 2025, Apple delayed the release of an upgraded Siri due to quality issues.
According to one of the class-action lawsuits, Apple misrepresented “the capabilities of the iPhone 16 series and misled millions of consumers into spending hundreds of dollars on a phone they didn’t need based on features that didn’t exist.”
In December, Apple announced the retirement of its AI chief John Giannandre. In January, the company said it would use Google’s Gemini to power its AI products, including Siri.
