But in true Cupertino style, it insists privacy is still king—even as it rifles through fanboy’s Coldplay collections.

Instead of hoovering up data to feed its models like OpenAI or Alphabet, Job’s Mob says its upcoming system will analyse snippets of user emails on-device, comparing them against its synthetic datasets to fine-tune performance. It promises that no emails will leave the gadget.

The move is designed to fix a lingering problem: Apple’s AI features—like notification summaries and writing aids don’t work because made-up training data isn’t like what people write.

Writing on its Bog, Apple said:“When creating synthetic data, our goal is to produce synthetic sentences or emails that are similar enough in topic or style to the real thing to help improve our models for summarisation, but without Apple collecting emails from the device.”

The plan is to quietly bake this into the next beta versions of iOS and iPadOS 18.5, and macOS 15.5. Developers got an early look on Monday.

Job’s Mob has leaned on differential privacy for other gimmicks, like Genmoji, its custom emoji generator. The idea is to spot trends like “dinosaur with a briefcase” without linking it to an exact request.

Only users who opt into device analytics and product improvement in Settings will have their data used. For everyone else, the AI stays a bit dimmer.

The late pivot comes amid months of chaos in Apple’s AI unit, which has lagged far behind rivals. Bloomberg previously flagged internal bust-ups, missed deadlines, and a reshuffle that saw Siri wrenched away from AI boss John Giannandrea and dumped on Vision Pro architect Mike Rockwell and software tsar Craig Federighi.

Apple plans to trumpet fresh Apple Intelligence features in June, but don’t expect Siri to stop being useless until sometime in 2026.