Apple added eight words to the end of its privacy promise, and with iOS 27 your Siri conversations can become AI training data if you agree. The Protect privacy principle on Apple's machine learning site, updated September 9, now says personal data and interactions are "never used to train our foundation models unless you explicitly choose to help improve them." According to heise online, which spotted the edit, the sentence used to stop at the word models.
The choice arrives with Siri AI in iOS 27, which reaches the public on Monday, September 14. Per heise online, a privacy notice in the release candidate says Apple can store complete Siri and dictation interactions: audio, transcripts of typed and spoken requests, and Siri's replies. Apple says the data isn't linked to the Apple Account, and that some of it may be reviewed by Apple staff.
You meet the prompt when switching Siri AI on, and heise online says the only alternative to agreeing is a visually muted Not Now. Anyone who tapped through too fast can turn it off afterward under Analytics & Improvements in Settings.
Apple has asked before. After the 2019 uproar over contractors grading Siri recordings, Apple paused that program and brought it back as opt-in, and as recently as January 2025 its newsroom said Siri audio is kept only when users "explicitly opt in to help improve Siri." Under iOS 27, those opted-in interactions can feed foundation-model training as well as quality review.
heise online adds a second shift: with iOS 27, Google servers are part of Private Cloud Compute for the first time, the system Apple points to when it says cloud AI can stay as private as on-device processing. Both Siri AI and many Apple Intelligence features run through it.
To me, opt-in is the right mechanism for this, and a muted decline button works against it. iPhoners setting up Siri AI after the update should read that screen before tapping.
