Last week, Apple hosted its annual developer conference, WWDC. The keynote presentation started with new controls for parents to help them establish guidelines for their kids. I was surprised by this opening act, although there certainly has been no shortage of stories about kids, technology usage, and the potential harms of it.
Certainly more recent reporting amplifies these concerns when AI is added to the mix. But as I thought about it, this was perhaps Apple’s tacit admission that AI can be dangerous for kids. We know and we have a plan. Maybe.
The rest of the WWDC centered around AI and how Apple is integrating it into upcoming iOS/macOS/iPadOS software updates. Bear in mind, however, that Apple had a similar WWDC in 2024 when they unveiled Apple Intelligence, a series of slick demos that mostly ended up as vaporware. What seemed to be an exciting set of AI tools for Apple users devolved into spelling and grammar checking with primitive image tooling.
So Apple’s track record is not particularly strong. But unlike 2024, the keynote featured not just videos but presenters conducting AI demos on their iPhones. I have a higher degree of confidence that the features Apple revealed yesterday exist and will be released later this year.
The list of things Apple unveiled included better photo-editing, and more importantly, integrating what Apple knows about you—contacts, messages, etc.—within on-device search results.
Apple briefly described the underlying technology, claiming it was built on Apple foundational models and Google’s Gemini family of models (as was reported earlier in the year). Thus, Apple’s earlier partnership with OpenAI appears to be dead, as further indicated by rumors of OpenAI pursuing legal action.
Apple stressed the private nature of its AI system, describing it as “private compute.” Apple claims they will not know what their users send to AI, a considerable difference from most every other AI service, including the increasingly paternalistic Anthropic. For people who are privacy-minded, this is a good thing: you can ask about that suspect rash without being bombarded by itch cream ads served to you from Google or Meta. Or perhaps getting flagged for violating some policy you didn’t even know existed.
The demos were interesting, and frankly, I saw considerable utility for the masses. But I didn’t see anything truly groundbreaking compared with existing AI offerings from Google, Anthropic or OpenAI.
What Apple has at its disposal, though, is a huge user base. These features have the possibility of making advanced AI even more mainstream. Chatbot usage has become increasingly common, but the number of people who use Claude Cowork or agentic tools pales in comparison. Results from the first Anthropic Public Record support this:
As of late 2025, about 6% of Americans used AI every day for both work and personal life. These integrated users are a preview of what more intensive adoption of AI looks like, and possibly of where mainstream opinion is headed as adoption grows.
Anecdotally, when I mention Claude to most folks, I get curious stares or an uncertain silence followed by what is that?
Apple has an opportunity to bring more cutting edge AI tools to a broader market, similarly to Google’s recent changes to search.
Apple’s upgrades suggest that AI is becoming fully embedded into devices and utilities that people use every day. By the end of the year, AI will simply be a component of iPhone and Android devices. It will be no longer possible to shun AI without a high degree of technical acumen to use only a narrowing non-AI slice of the internet.
The public expresses concerns about AI, and we see this manifested as concerns about job losses or AI data centers, but actual usage AI tools continues to rise. And with embedded AI tools in search and on-device applications, it seems like the never AI position is increasingly untenable. Do you use Google? Do you use grammar checking or search in Apple Mail? Guess what, you’ve just used AI.
Apple’s AI tools are set to launch later this year (as long as you’re not in the EU or China, of course).
Leave a Reply