Apple was accused by shareholders in a proposed securities fraud class action on Friday of underestimating the time required to incorporate advanced artificial intelligence into its Siri voice assistant, which negatively impacted iPhone sales and the company’s stock price.
The case focuses on stockholders who would have lost hundreds of billions of dollars during the year that ended on June 9, when Apple made a number of aesthetic and feature-related upgrades to its devices while keeping AI changes to a minimum.
Requests for response from Apple were not immediately answered. The case was filed in federal court in San Francisco, and defendants include former CFO Luca Maestri, CEO Tim Cook, and Chief Financial Officer Kevan Parekh.
Eric Tucker, one of the shareholders, stated that when Apple introduced Apple Intelligence to make Siri more potent and intuitive at its June 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference, they were made to assume AI will be a major factor in the development of iPhone 16 devices.
However, they said that the Cupertino, California-based corporation did not have a working prototype of AI-based Siri capabilities and that it was unrealistic to think that the features would ever be available for the iPhone 16s.
When Apple postponed several Siri upgrades until 2026 on March 7, shareholders claimed the truth started to surface. This trend continued until June 9 at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, when analysts were dissatisfied by Apple’s appraisal of its AI development.
Since reaching a record high on December 26, 2024, Apple shares have dropped about one-fourth of their value, wiping away some $900 billion in market capitalization.
The case is Tucker v. Apple Inc et al, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 25-05197.
