Why Apple Banned ChatGPT for Employees and What It Means for Siri’s AI Future

Concerns About Data Leakage

According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple has added ChatGPT and Copilot to a list of AI services that employees are forbidden to use. Reporters have confirmed that the ban has been in place for several months.

Apple’s caution is understandable: ChatGPT historically used user conversations to train its models, raising privacy risks. In March a bug exposed some users’ conversation titles, prompting a temporary shutdown of the service. OpenAI now lets users disable chat‑history collection to protect their data.

Other large enterprises have issued similar restrictions. Amazon told staff not to feed code into ChatGPT after discovering the model could replicate internal code. JPMorgan limited global employee access for compliance reasons, and Samsung reported three data‑leak incidents linked to ChatGPT within 20 days. Apple’s policy aligns with these industry‑wide security measures.

Siri Is Set to Gain New AI Capabilities

9to5Mac reports that Siri will soon receive a new AI feature, code‑named Bobcat, which has been tested on the tvOS 16.4 beta under a framework called Siri Natural Language Generation. Early demos show Siri telling jokes on Apple TV and experimenting with language generation for timers.

The project is led by John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, who reports directly to Tim Cook. Giannandrea joined Apple in 2018 after eight years at Google, overseeing Core ML and Siri development.

Internal challenges have hampered Siri’s progress—slow decision‑making, cumbersome code, and a reluctance to let the model learn from user feedback. Apple has previously rejected features like long‑form conversation capabilities for being “too flashy” and potentially uncontrolled.

Despite the ban on external AI tools, Apple is clearly investing in its own large‑model technology, and the upcoming Siri enhancements suggest a strategic shift toward in‑house AI solutions.