Log in
The Financial Times, back on July 1, with the transcontinental byline “Michael Acton in San Francisco and Barbara Moens in Brussels” (non-paywalled summaries from 9to5Mac and MacRumors):
Apple chief executive Tim Cook and EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen held “constructive” talks on Tuesday as the two sides aim to lower the temperature in a bitter dispute over the iPhone maker’s new “Siri AI.”
An EU spokesperson said the virtual meeting had involved a “constructive exchange on topics of common interest, on which the work continues”. The meeting included a discussion of how Apple can launch its reinvented Siri in Europe while avoiding millions of dollars in fines for violating the bloc’s flagship competition rules, according to two people familiar with the talks.
[9 paragraphs of explanatory backstory on the Siri AI/DMA standoff elided ...]
The dispute triggered a fierce public backlash against the commission, with European officials reporting hundreds of emails from consumers accusing Brussels of depriving Europeans of a new technology. One EU official said that a commission spokesperson had received a stream of abusive messages, including several death threats.
If there are actual kooks who made credible death threats, of course they should be investigated, identified, and arrested. But mentioning this in the context of the “fierce public backlash” feels like fishing for sympathy over a deeply unpopular policy of zero benefit to Europeans. That there are hundreds or thousands of complaints is no surprise. This policy sucks and is indefensible on practical grounds.
In November, Apple first proposed a technical fix to the EU it later dubbed a “Trusted System Agent” — a layer of software between a user’s device data and a third-party AI model. It would allow rival AI assistants to draw on personal information from the device without giving them full access to the data. However, Apple has yet to build the agent, and said it was looking for assurances from the EU before it starts.
A commission official said its contact with Apple on the idea was limited, and that it lacked a concrete proposal or details on how such an agent would work beyond the general concept. They said Apple “focused on obtaining a green light to delay the compliance”.
That’s the nut of it. Last winter Apple sent an entire team, including engineers, to Brussels to present a proposal for the TSA (maybe that’s another acronym that needs rethinking on the basis of prior art) to ask, basically, “If we build this, would you deem it DMA-compliant?” and the Commission’s response was basically, “Build it first and then we’ll tell you, after we get feedback from your competitors on what they think of it.” And Apple doesn’t want to spend up to two years building a complex system, exclusively for the EU, only to find out then whether it was all for naught.
As for how detailed Apple’s Trusted System Agent proposal was, we have a he-said/she-said dispute. Apple said at a press briefing at WWDC that it was quite detailed. An anonymous “commission official” here told the Financial Times “that it lacked a concrete proposal or details on how such an agent would work beyond the general concept”. Apple has more credibility here, if only because their statements claiming the proposal was detailed weren’t from anonymous sources. They were on the record.
In the meantime, we’ve seen what the European Commission is demanding of Google with Android regarding third-party LLMs. I can’t see Apple ever agreeing to such a system for iOS. We don’t know the details of Apple’s TSA proposal, but I’d be rather flabbergasted if it enabled the things the EC is demanding for third-party AI providers on Android, like unrestricted background execution.
