Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., greets customers during the first day of in-store sales of Apple’s latest products at Apple’s Fifth Avenue store in New York, US, on Friday, Sept. 20, 2024.
Victor J. Blue | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Apple on Monday released a software update for iPhones, iPads and Macs that turns Apple Intelligence on by default for users with supported devices.
The updates, iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3 and macOS Sequoia 15.3, also disable AI summaries for news apps, which have gained a reputation for twisting news push notifications to display inaccurate facts.
The release is a milestone in the rollout of Apple Intelligence, the company’s suite of artificial intelligence features. Apple Intelligence is a critical service for Apple as it seeks to distinguish its products from competitors with an AI system integrated into iPhones and its other devices.
While Apple Intelligence is already featured in the company’s marketing for the latest iPhones, the rollout has been deliberate and limited. Apple says that is to allow it to test new features and make sure it has enough server capacity. The entire Apple Intelligence suite is still officially in beta, and it’s only available in a handful of English-speaking countries.
Apple’s move to turn Apple Intelligence on by default is a step toward a more complete rollout of the feature. Previously, users with supported iPhones — models that were released in 2024 as well as 2023 “Pro” level models — were prompted to turn on Apple Intelligence when setting up their phone, a process that included downloading AI models from the internet and some installation.
With the latest updates, Apple Intelligence will be turned on by default when the latest software update is installed, expanding the number of users who are exposed to the software. Apple Intelligence is marketed as being able to rewrite text, generate images, and summarize long emails and message threads.
“For users new or upgrading to iOS 18.3, Apple Intelligence will be enabled automatically during iPhone onboarding,” Apple said in the developer release notes for the update.
Users will have to navigate to the Apple Intelligence page in the Settings app to turn it off, according to Apple.
The latest software update also includes one of the most notable examples so far of Apple rolling back an AI feature after it generated controversy and subpar results. Apple joins Googleand Microsoft as companies that were forced to recall new AI features after they generated harmful content or “hallucinations” that weren’t based in reality.
Apple Intelligence can take stacks of notifications and simplify them into a three-sentence notification. However, the BBC and other news outlets discovered in December that the feature can twist news headlines into inaccurate information.
Earlier this month, Apple’s system 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.
The latest update disables Apple Intelligence for news and entertainment apps. Apple Intelligence also has been updated to show any notifications generated by its AI in italics, signifying which notifications are created by generative AI and which were pushed by the app itself.
“We’re pleased that Apple has listened to our concerns and is pausing the summarization feature for news,” a BBC spokesperson told CNBC.
Apple told CNBC earlier this month that its notification summaries for news apps would return in a future update.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025.
Hamad I Mohammed | Reuters
Tesla’s shares have finally turned positive for the year.
After a dismal first quarter, which was the worst for the stock in any period since 2022, and a brutal start to April, following President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping new tariffs, Wall Street has again rallied around the electric vehicle maker.
The stock rose 3.6% on Monday to $410.26, topping its closing price of 2024 by over $6. It’s up 85% since bottoming for the year at $221.86 on April 4. A new filing revealed that CEO Elon Musk purchased about $1 billion worth of shares in the company through his family foundation.
It’s the second straight year Tesla has bounced back after a down first quarter. Last year, the shares fell 29% in the first three months before ending up 63% for 2024.
In recent weeks, analysts have praised the EV maker’s proposed pay plan for Musk, which could amount to a $1 trillion windfall for the world’s richest person over the next decade. The company has also gotten a boost from its new MegaBlocks battery energy storage systems that Tesla ships preassembled to businesses looking to lower their power costs or make greater use of electricity from renewable resources.
Even with the rebound, Tesla is the second-worst performer this year among tech’s megacaps, ahead of only Apple, which is down about 5% in 2025. Tesla is still in the midst of a multi-quarter sales slump due to an aging lineup of EVs and increased competition from lower-cost competitors in China, namely BYD.
Tesla has seen a consumer backlash, in part because of Musk’s political activities, including spending nearly $300 million to propel President Trump back to the White House and his work with the Trump administration to slash the federal workforce.
Tesla leadership has been working to shift investors’ attention to other topics such as robotaxis and humanoid robots.
However, the company has yet to deliver vehicles that are safe to use without a human onboard and ready to take control if needed. And while Musk is touting Tesla’s Optimus robots, which he says will be able to do everything from factory work to babysitting, a product is still a long way from hitting the market.
Shares of the search giant jumped more than 4% on Monday, pushing the company into territory occupied only by Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple.
The stock got a big lift in early September from an antitrust ruling by a judge, whose penalties came in lighter than shareholders feared. The U.S. Department of Justice wanted Google to be forced to divest its Chrome browser, and last year a district court ruled that the company held an illegal monopoly in search and related advertising.
But Judge Amit Mehta decided against the most severe consequences proposed by the DOJ, which sent shares soaring to a record. After the big rally, President Donald Trump congratulated the company and called it “a very good day.”
Read more CNBC tech news
Alphabet shares are now up more than 30% this year, compared to the 15% gain for the Nasdaq.
The $3 trillion milestone comes roughly 20 years after Google’s IPO and a little more than 10 years after the creation of Alphabet as a holding company, with Google its prime subsidiary.
CEO Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Alphabet in 2019, replacing co-founder Larry Page. Pichai’s latest challenge has been the surge of new competition due to the rise of artificial intelligence, which the company has had to manage through while also fending off an aggressive set of regulators in the U.S. and Europe.
The rise of Perplexity and OpenAI ended up helping Google land the recent favorable antitrust ruling. The company’s hopes of becoming a major AI player largely ride with Gemini, Google’s flagship suite of AI models.
The U.S. and China have reached a ‘framework’ deal for social media platform TikTok, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday.
“It’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon,” he said from U.S.-China talks in Madrid.
Both President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet Friday to discuss the terms. Trump also said in a Truth Social post Monday that a deal was reached “on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save.”
Bessent indicated that the framework could pivot the platform to U.S.-controlled ownership.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The comments came during the latest round of trade discussions between the U.S. and China. Relations have soured between the two countries in recent months from Trump’s tariffs and other trade restrictions.
At the same time, TikTok parent company ByteDance faces a Sept. 17 deadline to divest the platform’s U.S. business or face being shut down in the country.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Monday that the deadline may need to be pushed back to get the deal signed, but there won’t be ongoing extensions.
Read more CNBC tech news
Congress passed a law last year prohibiting app store operators like Apple and Google from distributing TikTok in the U.S. due to its “foreign adversary-controlled application” status.
But Trump postponed the shutdown in January, signing an executive order in January that gave ByteDance 75 more days to make a deal. Further extensions came by way of executive orders in April and in June.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnicksaid in July that TikTok would shutter for Americans if China doesn’t give the U.S. more autonomy over the popular short-form video app.
As for who controls the platform, Trump told Fox News in June that he had a group of “very wealthy people” ready to buy the app and could reveal their identities in two weeks. The reveal never came.
He has previously said he’d be open to Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison or Tesla CEO Elon Musk buying TikTok in the U.S. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity has submitted a bid for an acquisition, as has businessman Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty internet advocacy group, CNBC reported in January.
Trump told CNBC in an interview last year that he believed the platform was a national security threat, although the White House started a TikTok account in August.