Apple won't roll out AI tech in EU market over regulatory concerns
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Apart from the “security concerns” of allowing use of non Apple services it will be interesting to hear the specifics of these. I thought most AI features were being released in American English before other locales in 2025 anyway - this does sound like an excuse to get the public to put pressure on the EU
I would think that if the EU requires Apple to allow third parties to use the new screen sharing APIs with the same privileges, that would be a security concern.
This way I can have more AIs analyzing my screen.
Besides how profitable will it be for AI to know that Ev's reloading HN again? And again and again and again.
Maybe we can get AI to serve me on onscreen ad!
1. On device
2. Private cloud compute (aka Apple’s servers)
3. OpenAI (but only if you approve each time it’s used)
This isn’t really a new thing - you could always tell that some of Apple’s AI features depending on remote servers by disconnecting from the internet, using Siri and seeing how much of it stopped working.
Personally, I actually am somewhat encouraged that tech companies are subject to legal process (in the form of lawsuit discovery etc). Tech companies have paid billion-dollar settlements for allegedly breaking the laws in segments of their business that don’t generate billions in profits. Obviously there’s a lot of room for them to push the limits of the law, disagreement about what the law is, and there mays be ways for them to get away with things. But the fact that audits are happening, the code and logs can end up in court acts as some kind of constraint on their behavior.
“We’ll take the extraordinary step of making software images of every production build of PCC publicly available for security research. This promise, too, is an enforceable guarantee: user devices will be willing to send data only to PCC nodes that can cryptographically attest to running publicly listed software” [1].
If I can do AI on a computer in my pocket then why are we investing all of this money building AI Factories?
I'm not a lawyer, but I didn't need to be one to see the 0.5 €/user/yr fee and think "yeeeeah that won't fly".
Or maybe Apple's legal team should hire me to advise on the spirit of the law.
As far as original intent goes, the EC wrote it, and very recently. There won't be much of a debate if it comes down to that, but if the CJEU is inclined to go straight to the text and question the parties on that, Apple might actually have a decent shot at beating the EU in court, but then theoretically the EC can just rewrite the law and try again and there really isn't anyone that could stop them so… yeah.
Apple's approach to AI integration draws a pretty clear line between the part that Apple controls and takes credit/blame for privacy of (i.e. on-device models and their private cloud system) and third-parties that require specific consent to send data to (ChatGPT).
If the EU decided that Apple has to allow their whole on-device and private cloud stack to be warning-less-ly swapped out for PII_GrabberGPT, NüdLeaker Pro, or ScamBot9000 if the user chooses it from a legally required randomized menu, then I can see why they would have rational concerns about user privacy.
I imagine they need the likes of Mistral to lobby for them. Being locked out of the richest billion people in the world’s phones structurally disadvantages the European AI sector.
[1}: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/eff-tells-eu-commissio...
It is a massive hit, though. Not just in Financials over missing millions of users, but in many other indirect ways regarding taxes, overseas relations, resources, and competition. You don't want to just give all that to some competitor who will take the time to bend over backwards for the EU.
SKUs is also a huge manufacturing cost as well. If you've worked in GPU programming you know the sheer hit in performance that branching can cause (without a lot of smart planning). It's the exact same with factories, but on a scale of months instead of seconds.
I don't see Europeans siding with the American companies on this, if it becomes a conflict it may easily end the same way it ends in China and the USA: Banning foreign owned companies operating in certain industries due to national security reasons.
Have you heard about the rise of far-right in the EU? These right wingers are not the same as the American ones, they don't intent to make America Great again but to make Europe great again. They don't obsess with abortion and stuff but with foreign influence and the only reason some of these are sympathetic to Russia is because they see it as "enemy of their enemy, America". Even in UK there's non-negligible anti-Americanism and the lefties(among which anti-Americanism is more widespread) are about to take power.
If Trump wins the elections and the USA insulates itself as he promises, you can reasonably expect to see the market of Apple and all other tech companies dropping to US-only.
The EU smartphone market will be filled with Korean/Chinese brands who will be willing to cooperate, likely even partnering with local capital to come up with European brands in this.
But who knows, a lot can change with the wars and political realignment going on. It's also possible for Europe to completely give up in exchange of protection but that seems less likely as the US is pushing in the other direction.
We made that mistake with social media, not taking it seriously enough. I can wait a hot minute for my iPhone to summarise paragraphs whilst we try and avoid rampant, democracy breaking technology 2.0.
Is there a possible world where that is your choice and that vision is not imposed on me ? I fully respect your point of view and strongly believe you should have that option at your disposal.
But I also feel like having an AI model running on my (private) device should be an option available to me if I want to.
And also this: https://sdw.space/europe-wants-to-end-encryption/
And I support it.
Big tech cries crocodile tears and then makes their products compatible with EU regulations anyway.
btw the iphone has ±30% of the EU market, in the US they're closer to 60%. Mac represents ±7% of computer sales in Europe, ±15% in the US
How does low pay affect the “liveability” of work conditions? A waitress in the US makes as much or more than a software engineer in most of the EU. While the EU worker may receive more vacation time, and while he certainly has better personal financial skills (poverty will do that to you), he has no path towards a better future. A blue collar American worker, in the (increasingly unlikely) event that he chooses to manage his money well, can end up wealthy. A European who isn’t born wealthy will never become wealthy.
>public healthcare
Which everyone avoids, if they can afford it. The private system is really good though.
>parental leave
Because of the cost and risk of employing someone in the EU, when an employee takes maternity leave it’s the other employees who end up having to do the missing employee’s work. This is especially true with small businesses.
>communist nightmare
Over-socialized neo-feudal peasants who embrace their own impoverishment because they’ve been convinced that they’re superior to everyone else is pretty dystopian.
If we’re talking about modern nation states then China was either founded in 1912 (ROC) or 1949 (PRC), depending on who you ask.
This is definitely a bit off-topic compared to the article, but it's worth noting that those modals are there to obtain consent to store and use your personal data, and aren't specifically related to cookies (anymore), but the GDPR. If the news website didn't store personally identifying information about you (anywhere! not just in cookies), it wouldn't have to obtain consent, and wouldn't need any modals.
I think the most annoying part of the regulation has been its lack of enforcement, because it has led to a weird sort of complacency where there's no clear knowledge of what is and isn't required, and then websites half-ass the banner (for example, they should be making it as easy to click Reject as it is to click Accept, not sending you down a dark pattern of checkboxes and stuff), or throw up a banner just to say they have one, even if they don't need it (I've seen that!).
So we get the worst of both worlds: bad modals that don't even do what they're supposed to, and no enforcement to correct any of it.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" (Hanlon's razor)
There is no silver lining to this. The EU has to stop strangling its most productive industries with onerous regulations, and allow markets the freedom to innovate and increase productivity.
In the short term, lagging productivity can be masked by debt spending and other measures, but in the long run, the only thing that increases human wealth and material abundance is labor productivity. Everything else is illusionary.
All human societies have sought to increase labor productivity. The first stone tools, agriculture, and nuclear reactors are all productivity-enhancing inventions. Any society that opts out of seeking labor productivity will eventually see their wealth, living standards, and ultimately happiness decline. There is no way out of that trap.
And to be clear, there’s absolutely nothing good about low productivity for workers. All that means is that you’re spending more time working for lower wages, to produce things of lower value.
> Any society that opts out of seeking labor productivity will eventually see their wealth, living standards, and ultimately happiness decline. There is no way out of that trap.
I'd argue the reverse - any society that privileges productivity over social reproduction and liveable cities will never be able to tame violent crime, achieve real social mobility or provide a safe and enriching environment for a majority of its citizenry.
If the EU thinks that low labor productivity is the path to happiness, going down that path is their prerogative, but long term that path will only lead to ruin. Lagging productivity has never in human history lead to civilizational success. Europe will be outcompeted and eventually dominated by its more productive peers.
Just patently untrue. The more productive you are the more work your boss will send your way, while walking away with fatter margins. If he can. Which is where EU regulation comes in.
Europe’s rules govern the balance between capital owners and labor. It’s far from perfect but it has resulted in fairly stable and happy societies. (At least apart from certain external factors)
Now there is of course nothing wrong with productivity. It is, as you say, very good in many ways. But you cannot look only at a society’s productivity metrics to judge success-and my by success I mean happiness, because that is my goal. Look at happiness in the US vs Europe for example. I know where I’d rather live.
The optimal is not always the best for people.
Due to the demands for constant economic growth increased productivity does not actually result in more free time, just more economic output.
The average American now spends just 10% of their wages on food. That effectively means, just 10% of Americans’s working life dedicated to food cultivation. That’s the result of economic productivity.
If an American is happy existing at a subsistence level, they’re free to slash their working hours to a tiny fraction of the average person. However, humans have unlimited material desires, which tends to keep us working.
In a profit-driven business, the more productive the workers are, the more work you can throw at them. Free time doesn't enter into the equation unless business owners need to manage a compliance issue regarding labor regulations.
Right, there are so many countries in the world where increased productivity led to 4-day work week. In fact, I could count these countries on the fingers of one hand.
Source!
> Less productivity means everyone in Europe will get poorer, with declining living standards
We have some of the highest living standards in the world. In caparison to the U.S.A. in particular, it's like a utopia.
> There is no silver lining to this. The EU has to stop strangling its most productive industries with onerous regulations, and allow markets the freedom to innovate and increase productivity.
The silver lining is American cultural imperialism is ended in Europe, and we live how we want to over here. There are different ways of living, with different values.
Give it a few more decades of compounding lagging productivity, and that will no longer be true.
> The silver lining is American cultural imperialism is ended in Europe, and we live how we want to over here. There are different ways of living, with different values.
Productivity has nothing to do with cultural imperialism. China has dramatically increased their productivity, and that story has nothing to do with American imperialism
Maybe less integration will turn out better. Do we need native apps? You can use a website and then cut and paste.
- spyware
- built on copyright theft
- striving to be vendor lock-in
- vc thing with enshittification waiting to happen
silly eu regulating bleeding age technology. so much borrowed money not spend.
Agreed, and; hooray!
Rather than plunging us "into technological irrelevance", it saves us from nonsense nobody asked for, mostly existing to sell more hardware that nobody needs.
This decreases my trust in Apple.
You can’t secure your house if the law requires you to open the door to anyone who asks.
Many Apple Intelligence won't fully rollout until sometime in 2025, so there's time for the EU to decide what they want to do.
They can't, or they won't?
Just because they say they can't do something doesn't mean it's true, especially when that something can negatively affect their profits and market share, so then they weaponize it as "think of your security!".
Considering Apple's insane wealth and technical expertise, it's definitely possible, they just don't want to do it because they want things their way not the government's way, unless that government is China, then everything is suddenly technically possible. Using Chinese cloud providers for iCloud? You got it. CCP backdoors for everything? Consider it done.
So no, it's just a tantrum.
Take a look at Apple's Private Cloud Compute white paper [1] and explain how Apple's supposed to make it DMA-compliant without sacrificing its security and privacy guarantees. Short answer: they can't without essentially starting over.
EU residents will get all of the other iOS 18 features but not Apple Intelligence and a couple of others. The average EU citizen won't even know anything is missing.
Even for those who are paying attention, they're used to getting tech features long after they're available to the rest of the world.
Why should I figure it out for them? That's why they have so many highly skilled well paid engineers on their payroll, to solve stuff like this.
It's not my job to solve their cloud architecture design issues. Why don't they use some of that 24 Billion in EU revenue to engineer it to be EU privacy compliant?
And excuse me for not trusting their own biased interpretation of the reasoning why their clod architecture is incompatible with EU regulations. I have as much trust in that explanation as in a school kid explaining how he can't do his homework because his dog is eating it.
Until I get an unbiased opinion form a independent third party, I'm not buying Apples sob story tantrum.
A core feature of Apple’s Private Cloud Compute platform is the ability for 3rd parties to validate the integrity of the platform.
"Europe", not the EU.
And Apple's "Europe" segment isn't even just Europe. It also includes India, the Middle East and Africa.
If EU would have a VC sector anywhere near the US or even Chinese ones, this is actually the perfect time and market opportunity for a local EU competitor to come out and launch a privacy focused smartphone that's compliant with local market regulations and also includes the AI features that Apple refuses to release out of spite.
Apple only does shit like this because they know that the alternatives EU has in the consumer facing smartphone tech space is weak AF and poses no significant competition and no threat to them, unlike in China where Huawei and Xiaomi are ready to pounce if Apple were to slip.
Regulations are good, but having domestic alternative competitors is even better, and the EU is lacking here and Apple knows this hence it can play chicken.
Once people are tied to an ecosystem for many years, they're not just gonna abandon it without a major life inconvenience.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act
I think a company not being allowed to add features for their customers is a bit silly.
And if they pull out, it’ll hurt even more because they make everything under the sun.
Or being part of a nefarious botnet "surviving"?
Or accidentally installing keyloggers "surviving"?
But no, I wouldn't call it "surviving" if you get hit by ransomwhere and have to pay hundreds/thousands of dollars to restore your data, or lose your data.
Pegasus?
It's a matter of tradeoffs. In exchange for making more security decisions for yourself, you wind up with a much higher risk of losing your data and privacy. So it's important to acknowledge what you're giving up as well.
And Apple isn't exactly a "random tech company". It's currently literally the third largest company in the world [1]. That's about as opposite of being a "random" company as a company can possibly be.
In contrast, it's precisely the software that people do install from seeming "random tech companies" that can conceal secret keyloggers, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...
I think they're more motivated by trying to scaremonger about the DMA, in much the same way they and others did about GDPR.
Seriously, what kind of fearmongering can Apple push that doesn't make you side-eye the OpenAI integration even more?
Right - which is why the ChatGPT integration is such a small part of the total Ai/LLM capabilities they announced, and they've loudly and publicly announced that it will support other 3rd parties in the future.
Buuuuut - what happens if/when the EU decides the DMA requires Apple to open up their Private Cloud and on-device models to 3rd party replacement?
Some of them might be worse for privacy, but if they offer better (or cheaper, which can be a quality) features, that's up to people.
If this was "the olden days", it would be a legitimate concern. But mobile OSs have long forced Apps to request permission to use various features explicitely and fall back graciously when some aren't provided. So outside security concerns that exist either way, they really can only claim to care about misinformed users.
Recall was seen as 1st party spyware, Apple has more privacy trust and their implementation is very secure. Allowing Bob's AI screen reader to access the same total file/device access is very scary.
If you don't look at Recall and Apple Intelligence with the same suspicion, you're stupid. Currently they are literally the same product, rebranded and marketed to different users. Two data pipes leading to one company's pool. But Apple's pipe is safer because... they have more "privacy trust" and Twitter says their whitepaper looks secure. You're being robbed in plain daylight and defending the robber; the implications of both features are disastrous.
Then I don't see why people are defending the opposite statement, preemptively.
> Buuuuut - what happens if/when the EU decides the DMA requires Apple to open up their Private Cloud and on-device models to 3rd party replacement?
Literally nothing bad? If Apple implements all of these third-party models the same as their first-party ones, I think that would be awesome. People could replace Siri with Mistral and start getting useful results back instead of the same canned responses.
Didn’t they say they have models running on-device?
I'm not being snarky but you should be celebrating this since it's working as intended. I think it's a healthy sign when big tech companies are forced to a take pause before releasing a feature to masses.
There are consequences to regulations/legislation. You can't have it both ways. News at 11...
The privacy concerns are real, and EU regulations have teeth. No matter how iron-clad Apple's agreement is with OpenAI, it's still a significant liability since data protection and the rest that comes with this tech is outside of Apple's control. So now EU citizens don't get to play with this new feature. It's pretty simple.
As someone who has been involved in this journey from the beginning, essentially starting from a point akin to "fuck the EU, they're laughably ignorable" it's really interesting to read this sentence. We can work with that.
If you don't have a physical presence within the EU, you can and probably should ignore their laws/regulations. There's very little if anything they can do to you. This includes GDPR and other "viral" laws. EU citizens seem to believe their laws apply around the world - they do not.
If you have a physical presence within the EU, like Apple does, then you cannot afford to be flippant with EU laws and regulations. They have real teeth, as you would expect for any country you have a physical presence in. Just as Apple cannot ignore US law since they are based here, they cannot ignore EU law since they are also based there.
EU regulations have consequences - both good and bad. If Apple cannot guarantee compliance with EU regulations/laws, then they will have to remove or limit features that might get them into trouble.
If EU citizens want this feature, then the regulations would need to change. It cannot be more simple than this.
A lot of people enjoy eating the cake these days...
Not arguing against that. The first thing is to be able to steer. And then you can steer in the right direction. So I'm glad it seems we'll finally be able to steer. Now we can figure out where exactly we want to end up.
Clearly Apple is worried that DMA will force them to open an API to do those things with a random 3rd party phone.
And Apple doesn’t want to compromise on security to achieve it - nor do the work needed to create an open API for all that.
an app could give permission to be shared, and it definitely should receive user permission to get the stream
Will their civilization fall down like the Roman empire?
People talk about AI as if it were literally water
Why? Locally-runnable models like LLama3 already work almost as good as ChatGPT.
TL;DR: reports that there are talks with Baidu, Alibaba, Baichuan AI
Jokes aside, this feels like Apple’s effort to jab at the EU market for forcing them to allow other App stores and forcing RCS on them.
Huh?
The logic here is pretty straightforward, really. You might disagree, but the legal concern here is not confusing.
eu hold and they lose sales: "we will suffer for our users. ai will work on eu devices"
eu relax regulations: obvious win.
eu hold and sales keep rising: saves a ton of server costs and blame the government.
it's a win-win-don't-lose
I wouldn't blame them for having security/IP concerns with allowing unannounced remote or on-site inspections to their facilities.
if they are holding on ai (what can move the government) they are likely wanting leverage on something else (paired sale, charger standardization, who knows). it's definitely things that are costing them profits already.
If that makes the EU look bad, imagine how goddamn incompetent the US regulators look right now.
Then so be it. If Europe's market collapses under the weight of it's own regulation, it's not Apple's fault. Except, Europe's market isn't collapsing and in fact leading multiple nations in drafting similar legislation. If forcing Apple to compete makes their risk forecast worse, reciprocally, that's not the EU's concern or problem. It might just reward the innovation and smart consumer-first design Apple has been avoiding recently.
If you think these laws are "unclear" then you must be in abject denial of what it's purpose is. It's called the "Digital Markets Act". There is a single company that these crosshairs are aimed at, and Apple wants to whine and say it's not fair that a municipal government caught their profiteering racket. Poor thing! What if trillion-dollar Apple decides they can't invest in Europe's future!
Scaremongering. The EU isn't inherently righteous, but their lack of connection to Apple's tax dollars made it very easy to call out Apple's hypocrisy. All Apple can do is whine, and pretend like they weren't illegally abusing Europe's market. I say pretend, because Apple knew full-well that what they were doing was wrong, and now invests inordinate amounts of money marketing, lawyering and lobbying their way out of it.