Apple claims that regulations requiring compatibility with competing goods will jeopardise security and privacy
Apple has chosen to postpone the rollout of three new AI capabilities in Europe due to EU competition laws, which mandate that the business ensure that its goods and services are compatible with those of rivals. These features will launch this autumn in the US, but they won’t be available in Europe until 2025.
Due to regulatory difficulties resulting from the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), the business said on Friday that three features—Phone Mirroring, SharePlay Screen Sharing improvements, and Apple Intelligence—will not be made available to consumers in the EU this year.
Apple claimed that complying with EU standards would mean sacrificing the security of its products, a claim that EU officials have refuted.
“In particular, we are worried that the interoperability mandates of the DMA might compel us to jeopardise the integrity of our products, potentially endangering user privacy and data security,” Apple wrote in a message.
According to the European Commission, Apple would be accepted in the EU provided it complied with local regulations, as reported by Bloomberg.
The business unveiled Apple Intelligence, a collection of artificial intelligence tools that combines ChatGPT and Siri to search the web and produce text or images, during its annual developer conference earlier this month.
Later this year, when Apple releases its new mobile operating system, assistive features will be able to search through a phone’s emails, texts, and images to find specific information at the user’s request.
The capabilities will be available on Macs with the M1 chip and later versions, as well as the iPad, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max. Users can watch and interact with the screen of their phone on Mac computers thanks to iPhone Mirroring on MacOS Sequoia.
“We are dedicated to working with the European Commission to find a solution that would allow us to provide these features to our EU customers without compromising their safety,” stated Apple.
Apple underlined how serious it is about protecting user privacy with its latest AI features. CEO Tim Cook gave an assurance at the beginning of June that the features would be “grounded in your personal context like your routine, your relationships, your communications, and more.”