Apple pays $250 million for the Siri promise it made two years ago and still hasn't kept

Apple has agreed to pay $250 million to settle a class action lawsuit that accused it of misleading iPhone buyers about Apple Intelligence, the AI bundle it pitched as Siri's biggest upgrade in years—most of which never shipped.The deal, filed Tuesday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, covers Americans who bought any iPhone 16 model or the iPhone 15 Pro between June 10, 2024 and March 29, 2025. Eligible buyers can claim $25 per device, with payouts climbing as high as $95 depending on how many people file. A judge still needs to approve the agreement.The case traces back to WWDC 2024, where Apple unveiled a more "personalized" Siri that could pull context from emails, messages and apps and act on the user's behalf. That Siri never arrived. Other promised features ran into their own problems—Apple's AI-generated notification summaries misrepresented news headlines often enough that the company eventually disabled them, the New York Times reported.When the iPhone 16 launched that September, Apple still marketed it as "built for Apple Intelligence" even though several headline features were either delayed or missing. By March 2025, the company had pushed the upgraded Siri back by at least a year and pulled a now-infamous ad starring Bella Ramsey, who was shown using the assistant to recall a stranger's name from a meeting at Cafe Grenel. Axios, which broke the original lawsuit story that same month, called it fallout from Apple's earlier admission that the new Siri would miss its release window.Apple admitted no fault. Spokeswoman Marni Goldberg told the New York Times the suit really came down to "the availability of two additional features" within a much wider Apple Intelligence rollout that already includes Writing Tools, Genmoji, Image Playground, Visual Intelligence and Live Translation. Goldberg added the company resolved the matter so it could stay focused on building products.The plaintiffs were less generous. Lawyers for the class wrote that Apple promoted "AI capabilities that did not exist at the time, do not exist now"—and warned they might never arrive. They argued the marketing was designed to keep Apple in the conversation with OpenAI and Anthropic at a moment when investors openly worried it had missed the AI window.Internally, the company has already moved on. Former AI chief John Giannandrea retired in December, and Apple has since signed Google to power the upgraded Siri using Gemini. The settlement also lands as John Ternus prepares to take over from Tim Cook as CEO this September. Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that iOS 27, due this September, will let users pick which AI model handles requests across Siri, Writing Tools and Image Playground—with Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini in testing alongside OpenAI’s ChatGPT.The $250 million settles the past. Whether the new Siri actually delivers when it ships this year is the harder question—and one Apple still hasn't answered.