Apple Sued By Its Own Shareholder Over Siri AI Feature Delay, Allegedly Misled Investors With Fake WWDC Demo, Causing Stock To Crash Nearly 13 Percent
Apple announced iOS 18 last year, and at the heart of the update was Apple Intelligence, which made the update a surprisingly big one compared to prior builds. Since Apple delayed one of the biggest features, it is now facing backlash from internal and external parties. An Apple shareholder has now filed a class action lawsuit against the company in a California court over violations of federal U.S. securities laws.
Apple is facing investor backlash over the delayed Siri AI feature, which reportedly contributed to a sharp decline in the company’s stock value
The Personalized Siri experience was the highlight of Apple’s AI efforts, which was expected to be released to the public earlier this year. Apple was hopeful that the feature would be ready on time. However, it appears that quality and reliability issues caused it to be delayed, which left many disappointed in the industry. Eric Tucker, an Apple shareholder, has filed a class action lawsuit against the company, alleging that the iPhone maker made false statements related to the Personalized Siri feature, which was announced last year at the same time at WWDC.
The complaint further states that the company’s false claims hurt its stock prices, and as a result, the shareholders had to suffer. Apple’s stock prices fell by almost 13 percent after the company announced the Personalized Siri feature delay. The lawsuit alleges:
“Unbeknownst to investors, Apple lacked a functional prototype of these advanced AI-based Siri features at the time of the 2024 WWDC and had no reasonable basis to believe it could deliver the product it was advertising within the iPhone 16 product cycle, if ever.”
The complaint also mentions a post from The Daring Fireball, which stated that the Personalized Siri feature announced last year on stage was a concept video. However, company executives recently pointed out in an interview that the demo was indeed “genuine” and the feature was in a perfectly working state. The reason why it did not make it out to the public was reliability concerns, which the company is still working on.
This is not the first time Apple has had to face repercussions due to its inability to release the Personalized Siri feature. However, this one is rather important because the class action lawsuit was filed by Apple’s own shareholder, and the focus of the case is securities laws. Originally, Apple planned to release the Personalized Siri features with iOS 18.4, but the date slipped ahead to iOS 18.5 and so forth. Ultimately, the company decided to keep working on the feature and set the release date to next year.
It is alarming to see how Apple is having reliability issues after all this time, and it will not be presented well in the smartphone industry, where the company is losing the AI race to OpenAI and Google.
