"You think your watch records the audio around you? No no no. The audio flows into the Secure Enclave, and flowing is definitely not recording because it’s a different word." (https://leancrew.com/all-this/2026/09/new-apple-watches-have...)
via https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/record
Seems accurate if the audio captured isn't stored in a reproducible fashion.
Of course, Apple still collects more data than it needs to and abuses users in other ways, so I don't really feel bad for them.
Don't mean to make this sound like a gotcha, but the technical implementation is secondary to how there's no output .wav anyone could play back. I think saying "there's no recording" is a fair and clear to normal people description of what happens.
that’s really the question to be answered here.