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Apple has announced a new privacy-focused AI training system for iOS 18.5. It is designed to improve Apple Intelligence features by analyzing usage trends without compromising user privacy.
Apple is betting it can build smarter AI without sacrificing privacy; however, that balancing act may be slowing it down.
Apple struggles to balance user privacy with AI training data
Among AI companies, Apple has the best reputation for protecting user privacy. The tech giant firmly stated that “Apple does not use our users’ private personal data or user interactions when training our foundation models,” as it reaffirmed in its April 14, 2025 blog post.
But that commitment comes at a cost. By collecting less data, Apple has less high-quality information to train Apple Intelligence and other AI tools. Other rivals, such as Meta and xAI, have been training their AI models on user-generated data for years, leaving Apple to play catch-up.
A consequence of this challenge occurred in March, when Apple delayed an overhaul of its AI assistant Siri. This was a rare move for a company that almost never delays a product after its announcement. The new Siri was announced in 2024 and is supposed to debut in 2025, but will likely be pushed out at least a year.
Apple to rely on synthetic data and differential privacy to train AI
In Apple’s recent blog post, the company outlined several methods it plans to use to improve Apple Intelligence while maintaining user privacy.
The tech company will leverage user differential privacy to obscure identifiable user data to improve Genmoji, a customer emoji creator tool. In future releases, Apple plans to extend this same technique to other features, including Image Playground, Image Wand, Memories Creation, and Writing Tools in Apple Intelligence and Visual Intelligence.Apple will also use synthetic data — i.e., mock data generated by AI — to create training sets for AI models that won’t compromise user privacy. According to Apple, the synthetic data will represent aggregate trends in real user data without collecting any actual emails or texts from devices. Only users who have opted to send Device Analytics information to Apple will participate in this email improvement campaign.