AI shut out of Apple’s App Store

If you hate the idea of ​​your information being used to train AI, you’ll love the small but vital change Apple just made to the iOS App Store.

“You must clearly indicate where personal data will be shared with third parties, including third-party AI,” the company told app developers, adding that all apps must “obtain explicit permission before doing so.”

The updated language – Apple’s first guide to third-party AI – is part of a document called App Review Guidelines. And don’t let the name fool you, the introduction makes it clear that following these guidelines is pretty much mandatory.

“We will reject apps for any content or behavior that we believe exceeds boundaries,” Apple tells developers later in the guidelines. “What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court justice once said, ‘I’ll know it when I see it.’ And we think you’ll know it too when you walk through it.”

The update, released last week, marks the first time AI has been mentioned in the guidelines. Apple, under the leadership of Tim Cook, has been very skeptical of AI, slow to include AI features in Siri, and sometimes even reluctant to use the letters “AI”; Cook has preferred to use the similar term “machine learning” in his previous speeches.

Collecting data to train AI models has become one of the most legally controversial activities in Silicon Valley. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, filed a lawsuit in April against OpenAI, alleging that it violated Ziff Davis’ copyrights in the training and operation of its AI systems.)

And even Apple, the AI ​​laggard that would soon use Google Gemini to power Siri, is not immune.

Last month, two lawsuits were filed against Apple, accusing Apple of improperly using other people’s work for its own AI training. In separate papers, two neuroscientists and two authors said Cook’s company used data from “ghost libraries” or pirated content available online.

While Apple’s response remains to be seen, the legal landscape doesn’t look very promising for the company. AI giant Anthropic settled a class-action lawsuit over its use of the Shadow Library in September for $1.5 billion.

But at least Apple can now legitimately claim to protect its users against AI data scraping within its applications.