Apple pauses AI notification summaries for news after generating false alerts

Apple is pausing AI notification summaries for news and entertainment apps after facing backlash for generating inaccurate news alerts. In addition, the company is introducing changes to notification summaries as a whole to allow for greater transparency.

With the latest round of developer previews for iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS Sequoia 15.3, Apple is disabling notification summaries entirely for all news and entertainment apps and will re-enable them in a future update after refining them.

The change comes a few weeks after the BBC complained to Apple after one of its articles was misrepresented to state that Luigi Mangione, the man charged in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had shot himself.

In addition to pulling notification summaries for select apps, all notification summaries will now be shown in italics to make it easier for users to tell them apart from regular notifications. Plus, users will be able to disable notification summaries for a specific app directly from their Lock Screen.

Apple will also start notifying users that the notification summaries feature is a beta feature when they enable the feature. This notification, found in the Settings app, will inform users that the feature may contain errors.

The changes don’t come as a surprise, as Apple last week that it would release an update to “further clarify” that the text being displayed in a notification summary is generated by Apple Intelligence. Some suspected this would be in the form of a new label or badge but so far that’s not the case.

While a public beta is expected to land next week, it’s unknown when iOS 18.3 will be available to the general public.