You see the ad, you feel the excitement, you spend the money, and then you wait. And wait. Eventually, quietly, you stop waiting as the thing you were promised simply never showed up.
That’s precisely what happened with Apple’s much-hyped AI overhaul of the voice assistant, Siri. And now Apple is paying a quarter of a billion dollars for misleading buyers.
A marketing blitz
Let me take you back to the September of 2024 when Apple made a marketing pitch its Siri was a reinvented. That meant the voice assistant could understand context, take actions across apps, and integrate with ChatGPT. The company’s ads were slick, the keynote moments were dramatic, and the message was clear: the iPhone 16 was an AI phone, and that Siri was finally, the assistant it always should have been.
But there was just one problem. None of it was ready at that point. And as it turned out, not for a very long time.
What Apple marketed as imminent never materialised. The company quietly confirmed the features were indefinitely delayed, pulled its own ads, and hoped the noise would die down. It didn’t.
Damning finding
A class action lawsuit followed, accusing Apple of having promoted AI capabilities that did not exist in its device at the time of launch, and until several months later. According to a Reuters report, even the U.S. advertising watchdog, Better Business Bureau’s National Advertising Division concluded that Apple had falsely suggested the new AI-powered Siri was “available now.”
That was damning finding as an enhanced Siri was the single most anticipated feature among potential iPhone buyers at the time. Apple knew people were buying phones because of what they were being told Siri could do. And it sold them anyway.
The settlement
On Tuesday (May 5, 2025), Apple agreed to pay $250 million to settle the lawsuit, without admitting any wrongdoing.
The settlement covers roughly 36 million eligible devices, specifically the iPhone 16, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max purchased in the United States between June 10, 2024, and March 29, 2025. If you bought one of those phones in that window, within the U.S., you are likely a class member.
Each eligible user might receive anywhere between $25 to $95 per device, depending on how many buyers make the claim. It is a paltry amount compared to the price of an iPhone, but at least it shows that a trillion-dollar company sold people a product on the basis of features that weren’t there.
The settlement still requires final approval from Judge Noel Wise of the federal district court for the Northern District of California, with a hearing scheduled for June 17, 2026.
Apple, in a statement said: “We resolved this matter to stay focused on what we do best: delivering the most innovative products and services to our users.”
The fate of non-U.S. buyers
The U.S. settlement doesn’t help iPhone buyers in other countries as class action is a American legal mechanism. Next to the U.S., the E.U. has a strong consumer protection mechanism mandated by the EU’s Directive on Representative Actions. It allows qualified consumer organisations to bring collective redress cases on behalf of large groups of affected consumers.
If any consumer organisation in the E.U. finds Apple’s advertising of Siri’s AI capabilities inflated, they could bring a legal complaint against the American company.
Beyond that, the E.U.’s existing consumer protection framework prohibits misleading advertising in clear terms. And the bloc is known for taking Big Tech companies to task for their unfair trade practices. The Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act have also made regulators more assertive. Any EU consumer who feels misled can file a complaint with their national consumer authority; in aggregate, those complaints can trigger formal investigations.
Moving away from the Atlantic, in India, the picture is more fragmented. The Consumer Protection Act of 2019 allows for complaints involving misleading advertisements. Individual consumers can also approach District Consumer Disputes Redressal Commissions.
But in the Asian nation, the challenge is structural as cases must generally be filed individually or through consumer groups, and the process can be slow. That said, if Apple’s Indian marketing made claims about Siri’s AI capabilities similar to those made in the US — and the global ad campaigns suggest it likely did — the legal and regulatory hooks exist.
The tech industry has spent the last two years drowning consumers in AI hype. Every product, and every update, has been dressed up in the language of transformation and intelligence. Apple’s Siri settlement is a rare moment where that rhetoric met actual legal consequence. It won’t be the last.
Published – May 07, 2026 08:19 am IST
