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Apple CEO Tim Cook delivers remarks at the start of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 10, 2024 in Cupertino, California. Apple will announce plans to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into Apple software and hardware. (

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Apple has temporarily disabled Apple Intelligence summaries for news apps for users of its beta software in a sign of the challenges the company is dealing with in its AI technology. 

The decision to pause AI summaries comes weeks after the BBC highlighted that Apple’s AI system had twisted its news notifications to display inaccurate facts. The pause only affects people using Apple’s beta software, not those using the company’s main operating systems. 

News and entertainment apps, such as The New York Times, began showing a short message inside the iPhone settings app on Thursday noting that AI-powered summaries were “temporarily unavailable.”

The pause on one of Apple Intelligence’s core features highlights the challenge Apple faces in the roll out of its artificial intelligence technology, which has been scrutinized by many users on social media.

“With the latest beta software releases of iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS Sequoia 15.3, Notification summaries for the News & Entertainment category will be temporarily unavailable,” an Apple representative told CNBC in a statement. 

The spokesperson noted that Apple is working on improvements to the software that are coming in a future software update. The company did not say when it will roll out its iOS 18.3 software to users of the main version of the iPhone operating system, but it could take weeks, based on Apple’s previous software release patterns.

The decision to temporarily pause the AI summaries comes on the same day that Apple saw its stock close down 4%, marking its worst day of trading since Aug. 5. A reason for the drop was due to notable Apple supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo writing on Monday that the Apple Intelligence suite of features does not appear to be boosting iPhone sales.

Apple Intelligence struggles since launch

The company launched Apple Intelligence in October as the signature feature in its latest line of iPhone models and its answer to Silicon Valley’s AI arms race that kicked off with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022. 

Apple has used the AI features as the key selling point in its advertisements and marketing for its latest hardware products, but the software has been riddled with issues. 

The company says that the entire Apple Intelligence system is in beta, and the update on Thursday added language to say that the AI software can produce unexpected results. 

Apple Intelligence includes several features, including image generators, but the one that’s received the most attention is how it can summarize entire stacks of notifications into concise sentences — useful, according to Apple’s marketing materials, for getting through hundreds of group chat notifications without scrolling through the whole discussion.

With the Thursday update, Apple said it will show any AI-summarized notification in italics to distinguish them from other notifications. 

In testing, Apple Intelligence summaries weren’t perfect, but the errors were mostly funny and obvious. Problems cropped up when the technology began being used to summarize news, and it displayed false information.

The most egregious well-documented error happened in December, when 22 separate BBC news notifications were combined into a three-part headline that started with “Luigi Mangione shoots himself.” The alleged Brian Thompson assassin has not done that.

The feature also combined headlines from The New York Times into a November notification that falsely said that Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested, according to a ProPublica reporter’s post on social media.

Another Apple Intelligence notification on Jan. 3 said that darts player Luke Littler had won a world championship, which had yet to take place, according to the BBC. The technology also conflated notifications from BBC’s sports app to say that “Brazilian tennis player, Rafael Nadal, comes out as gay.” Nadal is Spanish and is married to Maria Francisca Perello.

Apple on Thursday also rolled out a new feature that lets users turn off AI summaries for any app by swiping left on the notification from the phone’s lock screen. Users previously could only turn off AI summaries through the settings app. 

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Amazon suspends engineer who protested company’s work with Israeli government

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Amazon suspends engineer who protested company's work with Israeli government

Amazon suspended a software engineer who protested the company’s work with the Israeli government, CNBC has confirmed.

Ahmed Shahrour, a Palestinian engineer who works for Amazon’s Whole Foods business and is based in Seattle, was informed Monday morning that he was being suspended with pay “until further notice” after he posted messages on Slack criticizing the company’s ties to Israel.

“It has come to Amazon’s attention that a post you made in multiple internal company Slack channels may violate multiple policies,” an Amazon human resources representative wrote in a message, which was viewed by CNBC. The company said in the message that it’s investigating the incident.

Earlier Monday, Shahrour posted messages across several internal Slack channels and sent a letter to Amazon executives, including CEO Andy Jassy, detailing his concerns.

Shahrour urged the company to drop Project Nimbus, Amazon and Google’s joint $1.2 billion cloud computing contract launched in 2021 to provide the Israeli government with artificial intelligence tools, data centers and other infrastructure.

“Every day I write code at Whole Foods, I remember my brothers and sisters in Gaza being starved by Israel’s man-made blockade,” Shahrour, who joined Amazon three years ago, wrote in the letter. “I live in a state of constant dissonance: maintaining the tools that make this company profit, while my people are burned and starved with the help of that very profit. I am left with no choice but to resist directly.”

The letter was earlier reported by independent journalist Kali Hays.

Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser didn’t specifically address Shahrour’s situation.

“We don’t tolerate discrimination, harassment, or threatening behavior or language of any kind in our workplace, and when any conduct of that nature is reported, we investigate it and take appropriate action based on our findings,” Glasser wrote in an email to CNBC.

The company didn’t respond to questions about its work with Israel or its policies for moderating employee posts on internal channels.

Tech workers at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Palantir and other companies have become more outspoken in their criticism of business dealings with the Israeli military.

Microsoft last month fired two employees who participated in a protest inside the company’s headquarters. In April 2024, Google terminated 28 employees after a series of protests against labor conditions and its involvement in Project Nimbus. Tech firms have ramped up security at some conferences in recent months after an uptick in protests.

Amazon hasn’t acknowledged the Nimbus contract beyond stating that it provides technology to customers “wherever they are located.” Google has previously said it provides generally available cloud computing services to the Israeli government that aren’t “directed at highly sensitive, classified or military workloads.” Microsoft said last month that most of its work with Israel Defense Forces involves cybersecurity for the country, and that the company intends to provide technology in an ethical way.

As part of the suspension, Amazon revoked Shahrour’s access to company email and tools, and removed his Slack posts, he told CNBC in an interview. Shahrour said Amazon didn’t state what policies his posts violated.

The letter also alleges Amazon has taken steps to “silence” pro-Palestinian employees who have criticized the war in Gaza. Amazon recently issued a warning to an engineer who shared an article about American doctors volunteering in Gaza and it fired an employee in France who spoke out against Israel on social media, Shahrour said. CNBC confirmed the account with a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality.

The company has deleted posts in the “Arabs at Amazon” Slack channel that discussed the conflict in Gaza, while posts in other channels disparaging Palestinians weren’t removed, Shahrour said.

“It feels like I can’t voice anything, and if I do, I’m going to get a warning,” he said.

Microsoft employees earlier this year expressed concern that the company blocked Outlook emails containing the words “Palestine,” “Gaza,” “genocide,” “apartheid” and “IOF off Azure,” while messages with the word “Israel” could go through, CNBC reported in May.

A Microsoft spokesperson previously said the company took steps to “try and reduce” widely shared emails that were sent to employees who hadn’t “opted in.”

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Adobe’s stock gains on earnings, revenue beat

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Adobe's stock gains on earnings, revenue beat

An Adobe sign hangs along Main Street during the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 27, 2025 in Park City, Utah. 

David Becker | Getty Images

Adobe reported fiscal third-quarter results that topped analysts’ estimates. The design software maker’s shares rose in extended trading.

Here’s how the company did in comparison with LSEG consensus:

  • Earnings per share: $5.31 adjusted vs. $5.18 expected
  • Revenue: $5.99 billion vs. $5.91 billion expected

Revenue increased 11% from $5.41 billion a year earlier, Adobe said in a statement. Net income rose to $1.77 billion, or $4.18 per share, from $1.68 billion, or $3.76 per share, a year ago.

For the fourth quarter, the company says earnings per share will be $5.35 to $5.40, topping the average analyst estimate of $5.34. Adobe’s guidance for revenue for the quarter is $6.08 billion to $6.13 billion, while analysts expected $6.08 billion, according to LSEG.

Adobe said it expects annualized revenue in its digital media business to increase 11.3% for the fiscal year, up from a prior forecast of 11% growth. Digital media revenue for the fourth quarter will be $4.56 billion to $4.51 billion, beating the $4.51 billion average estimate, according to StreetAccount.

As of Thursday’s close, Adobe’s stock was down 21% this year, badly underperforming tech peers and the broader Nasdaq, which is up 14%.

This is developing news. Please check back for updates.

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Oracle shares retreat 6% after sharpest rally in more than 30 years

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Oracle shares retreat 6% after sharpest rally in more than 30 years

Safra A. Catz, CEO of Oracle, on Oct. 7, 2024.

Marco Bello | Reuters

Oracle shares closed down 6% on Thursday, a day after the stock closed at a record high, following an analyst note expressing concern that most of the company’s upcoming growth is coming from a single client: OpenAI.

The software vendor has seen its stock go on a wild ride this week after CEO Safra Catz on Tuesday said that Oracle had “signed four multi-billion-dollar contracts with three different customers” in the latest quarter. The company’s remaining performance obligation, a measure of contracted revenue that has not yet been recognized, swelled to $455 billion, up 359% year over year.

In its forecasts, Oracle called for cloud infrastructure revenue to expand 14-fold by 2030.

In extended trading on Tuesday, Oracle stock moved up 30% following the company announcing fiscal first-quarter results. On Wednesday, the stock ended the day up nearly 36%, closing at a record high of $328.33.

The build-out is part of a broad expansion across technology to put in place the necessary infrastructure to meet demand for applications that draw on sophisticated artificial intelligence models that typically run on Nvidia chips.

But the excitement around Oracle’s projections were tempered after The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday reported that OpenAI is set to pay Catz’s company $300 billion over five years. That report came after OpenAI during the quarter announced an agreement with Oracle to build 4.5 gigawatts of U.S. data center capacity. The two companies declined to comment on the report.

“Our enthusiasm for Oracle’s backlog announcements is significantly tempered by the report that it came almost entirely from OpenAI,” Gil Luria, an analyst with a neutral rating on Oracle shares, wrote in a note distributed to clients on Thursday.

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