Apple has agreed to pay $250 million to settle a federal class-action lawsuit accusing the company of promising a smarter Siri through Apple Intelligence that never arrived on schedule. Eligible owners of the iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max and iPhone 16 lineup can now file a claim worth $25 per device, a payout the settlement administrator says can climb as high as $95 depending on how many people apply. A federal judge in San Jose has granted preliminary approval to the deal, and claims must be submitted by Dec. 21, 2026.
An iPhone marketing promise that didn’t ship
The lawsuit centered on how Apple pitched the iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max and iPhone 16 models it sold between June 10, 2024, and March 29, 2025. Plaintiffs argued Apple advertised a Siri built on its new Apple Intelligence platform that could pull personal context from across a person’s apps and carry out multistep requests on command, then pushed those specific capabilities back repeatedly after the phones were already on shelves. The suit claimed the features were nowhere near ready when Apple used them to help sell the hardware.
The unmet promises were specific. At its 2024 developers conference, Apple previewed a Siri that could draw personal context straight from a person’s own device — retrieving a passport number or a saved recipe on request — read whatever was on screen to act on it, such as adding a texted address to a contact, and carry out actions across multiple apps, like drafting an email or filing an edited photo into a specific folder. Apple acknowledged in March 2025 that building those features was taking longer than planned and said it expected to roll them out within the following year, a year after the iPhone 16 models covered by this settlement had already shipped.
Ryan Clarkson, whose firm represented the plaintiffs in the case against Apple, called the result one of the largest false-advertising recoveries on record. “The $250 million settlement fund represents the largest false advertising settlement in history,” Clarkson told CBS News, whose reporting first laid out the claim terms for eligible owners. His firm, Clarkson Law Firm, describes the underlying dispute as a false-advertising action over Apple Intelligence features that were promised but not delivered at launch.
Who qualifies and the Dec. 21 deadline
Coverage extends to iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max units bought on or after June 10, 2024, plus any iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, iPhone 16 Pro Max or iPhone 16e bought through March 29, 2025. Buyers inside that window can file through the Smartphone AI Settlement site, the court-appointed administrator’s page, which does not require a receipt from most claimants and instead verifies eligibility against purchase records Apple already holds. The claim window closes Dec. 21, 2026, roughly two months before a judge decides whether to finalize the deal.
Court filings identify the case as Landsheft v. Apple Inc., proceeding in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, according to a settlement summary published by OpenClassActions. That summary lists a final approval hearing set for Feb. 24, 2027, before Judge Noël Wise, meaning the $250 million figure remains subject to a judge’s sign-off rather than finished business.
How the $25-to-$95 payment scales
Every valid claim starts at a flat $25 per eligible device. Whether it grows toward the $95 ceiling depends on turnout: the fund is fixed at $250 million minus attorneys’ fees and administrative costs, so a lower number of valid claims spreads that pool across fewer people and pushes individual checks higher, while a surge of claims keeps payouts closer to the $25 floor.
Apple has not conceded any wrongdoing as part of the deal. The company denies the allegations altogether, and the settlement paperwork states it “shall not be construed in any fashion as an admission of liability or wrongdoing by Apple.” Owners can submit only one claim per eligible device, and the administrator can request documentation if a purchase cannot otherwise be verified.
Not the same case as last year’s $95 million Siri deal
This settlement is separate from an earlier, unrelated Siri case that some owners may remember from 2025. In that dispute, Lopez v. Apple, a federal judge approved a $95 million settlement over claims that Siri recorded conversations without users saying “Hey, Siri” or pressing a button, then shared some of that audio with human contractors. That deal, covering Siri-enabled devices activated between Sept. 17, 2014, and Dec. 31, 2024, paid up to $20 per device rather than $95, according to the Lopez settlement’s own claims site. The two cases share a defendant and a product name, but not a courtroom, a theory of the case or a payout structure.
Apple has not said whether it plans to contest any objections before Judge Wise’s Feb. 24 hearing. Until that hearing concludes, the $250 million Apple Intelligence fund stays where it is now: preliminarily approved, open for claims, and not yet the final word on what Apple owes.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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