Apple won’t release its new AI features in the EU because they don’t comply with EU privacy and competition laws

Apple has announced it's not shipping three of its tentpole new features, announced during WWDC, in the European Union: Apple Intelligence, iPhone Mirroring, and SharePlay Screen Sharing.

Ever since the introduction of especially Apple Intelligence, the company has been in hot water over the sourcing of its training data - Apple admitted it's been scraping everyone's data for years and now used it to train its AI features. This will obviously have included vasts amounts of data from European websites and citizens, and with the strict EU privacy laws, there's a very real chance that such scraping is simply not legal. As such, it's simpler to just not comply with such stricter privacy laws than to design your products with privacy in mind.

As Steven Troughton-Smith quips:

How many EU-based sites did Apple scrape to build the feature it now says it can't ship in the EU because of legal uncertainty?

Steven Troughton-Smith

Other massive corporations like Google and Facebook seem to have little issue shipping AI features in the EU, and have been doing so for quite a while now. And mind you, as Tim Cook has been very keen to reiterate in every single interview for the past two years or so, Apple has been shipping AI features similar to what they announced at WWDC for years as well, but it's only now that the European Union is actually imposing regulations on them - instead of letting corporatism run wild - that it can no longer ship such features in the EU?

Apple is throwing its users under the bus because Tim Cook is big mad that someone told him no. As I keep reiterating, consent is something Silicon Valley simply does not understand.