Apple Sued for $250 Million — And It May Still Win the AI Race
Apple is facing a $250 million class action settlement over what plaintiffs call false advertising around Apple Intelligence.
The claim: Apple marketed the iPhone 16 as an AI breakthrough — specifically, a dramatically enhanced Siri that could integrate information across apps. What users got was significantly less impressive.
And yet, paradoxically, Apple may be better positioned than any of its GAFAM peers for the AI era ahead.
Here is why. While Google plans to spend $190 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, and Meta $145 billion, Apple spent just $4.3 billion in the first half of its fiscal year. Instead of building its own hyperscale data centers, Apple is partnering with Google to power Siri with Gemini foundation models — essentially renting intelligence rather than building it.
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Apple's strategy rests on a single, powerful insight: it already has 2.5 billion active devices in people's hands.
No AI company can match that distribution advantage. A more personalised Siri, announced for later this year, doesn't need to be the best AI model in the world. It just needs to be good enough — delivered directly through a software update to 2.5 billion screens.
The WWDC 2026 developer conference will be the next major test. If Apple delivers a convincingly upgraded Siri, the $250 million lawsuit will look like a footnote.
The European perspective: Apple's approach — distributing AI through existing devices rather than building new infrastructure — actually aligns well with European concerns about energy consumption and the environmental cost of AI data centres.