With so much concern about AI, should you trust Siri to access everything stored on your iPhone?

King Charles III warned of the "existential dangers" of AI systems falling into the wrong hands and asked the bosses of Nvidia, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI to ensure "our humanity remains sacred" while developing this technology. The existential dangers of AI were highlighted a few days earlier when a young researcher at Anthropic resigned from the San Francisco firm behind Claude. Writing on X, formerly Twitter, Jacob Coxon stated: "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade". @gbnews How will Apple tackle privacy concerns with their new AI advances?

GB News Technology Editor Aaron Brown asks the tech giant's Vice President of Product Marketing for Artificial Intelligence, Lilian Rincon, about what Apple are doing to help their users. #Apple #iPhone18 #AI #Tech #GBNews Even outside of the buildings where these advanced AI models are built, we've started to hear some worrying stories. Earlier this year, OpenAI confirmed that its newest ChatGPT model had broken out of a secure 'sandbox' to hack into a rival AI company to steal answers to a test that it had been set by researchers — something it was not instructed to do. Anthropic also recently revealed that one of its Claude AI models breached the systems of three real organisations during cybersecurity testing.

Likewise, Google Gemini guessed passwords until it gained access to a protected system, highlighting the hacking prowess of these advanced AI models. Britain's AI Security Institute (AISI), the state-backed research body that evaluates the safety of cutting-edge AI systems, now believes the smartest AI models can all skirt the safeguards put in place to keep them in check. It's against this backdrop that Apple has introduced Siri AI — a complete reimagining of the hands-free assistant introduced with the iPhone 4S back in October 2011.

Rebuilt from the ground up with deep knowledge of the world, it can daisy-chain multiple requests, read and act on information on your screen, change system settings, and draft emails, recipes, social media captions, notes, and much, much more for you. Siri AI was custom-built in collaboration with Google and its Gemini models, and now matches many of the features built into Gemini — the rival AI assistant baked into Android devices — like for like. Apple's reimagined Siri AI is SO good, your old iPhone will feel completely new But what sets Siri AI apart is the ability to search the treasure trove of personal information stored on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.

The rebooted AI assistant can trawl through your photo library, email, text messages, calendar appointments, notes, reminders, the list goes on and on... everything stored on your device can be searched. Siri AI can leverage this information to answer questions about your life. This all-new assistant can find a friend’s flight number from your calendar, a book recommendation in a group chat with family, an air miles account number from your email, or a specific photo from years ago.

While ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, and any of the other 'bots can help draft a letter, rewrite your CV, organise data into a spreadsheet, or answer a general knowledge query... none of these other AI helpers can dredge up information from a text you sent a decade earlier. And that's not all. Siri AI can take actions on your behalf — drafting and sending a text message, adding appointments to your calendar, or converting a lengthy document into a few bullet points in the Notes app.

Spearheading this transformed Siri is Lilian Rincon, a nearly decade-long Google veteran, who now serves as Apple's Vice President of Product Marketing for AI. She reports to Greg Joswiak, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, who has spent 40 years at the company working on everything from the original iPod to Apple TV+. The Apple executive — just 166 days into her new role — sat down with GBN Tech to discuss the rollout of Siri AI to millions of devices worldwide.

For Lilian Rincon, Siri AI’s ability to retrieve long-forgotten personal details from across Mail, Calendar, Photos, and Messages is a "superpower". Apple scraps Siri AI launch in Europe, but Brexit means UK iPhone owners don't miss out But when asked whether iPhone owners might be concerned about where Siri AI has found this information, or how that personal data has been processed, the AI executive replies: "Privacy is a value at the core of everything Apple does. With Siri AI and Apple Intelligence, that's something that's absolutely a promise." Lilian Rincon explains that Siri AI is "indexing the things on your device".

This creates an on-device database — known as the Spotlight Index — that organises the vast amount of information stored on your iPhone or other Apple device. It relies on metadata such as dates, names, locations, file types, apps, and keywords to categorise and link snippets of information together based on related details. For example, it connects a name in your text messages to a person tagged in your photos and calendar events.

When you ask a question, Siri can combine these attributes and relationships to quickly identify relevant information without searching each and every file individually. This process takes place over several days and is never stored outside of your device.

"If you were to get a new iPhone, it's going to reindex all of those things — all of those personal, private details that it knows about you," Lilian Rincon adds.

You can start using Siri AI almost immediately, but it will take a few days before it's able to surface everything that's stored about you on your device. @gbnews Apple's Vice President of Product Marketing for Artificial Intelligence discusses how the tech giant's new AI innovations Speaking to GB News Technology Editor, Aaron Brown, Lilian Rincon explores the new "superpower" available on Apple's newest device. #Apple #iPhone18 #AI #Tech #GBNews Building this database each time you switch to a new device — and building a separate, unconnected index for Siri on every Mac, iPad, or iPhone that you own — might seem like a laborious, protracted way to power this feature. In contrast, if you upload your CV into ChatGPT in your web browser as part of a request, the AI chatbot will be able to reference that same document from the iPhone or iPad app, since everything is stored on its servers. Not only will ChatGPT learn from this data to inform its impression of you , but by default, OpenAI can use uploaded content to improve its LLM models.

This doesn't apply if you use temporary chats. Even if you delete the chat, that associated file could take up to 30 days to disappear from OpenAI systems. LATEST DEVELOPMENTS iPhone 18 Pro review Apple's reimagined Siri AI is SO good, your old iPhone will feel completely new Where is the iPhone 18? iPhone Duo is the first foldable from Apple, and it arrives next month for £1,999 Apple Watch Series 12 unveiled with clever way to recover lost conversations Most of us store hundreds of thousands of emails, text messages, and photos stored on our devices, and yet Siri is able to access that one piece of information we're looking for within seconds.

That requires a ludicrous amount of processing power, which explains why Apple limits Siri AI to more recent hardware with its fastest chipsets. You'll need either an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max, or anything newer than iPhone 16, to use Siri AI. On iPad, you'll need an iPad mini with an A17 Pro, or any iPad with an M1 and later.

And that's the same for Mac, you'll need an M1 system-on-a-chip or newer to enjoy Siri AI features across all of your apps. "Siri AI's new superpower is really this ability to be personal to you. It starts with being able to use the Spotlight Index to index all of those really personal apps — Mail, Messages, Photos — in a way that's completely private to you.

And that's what allows it to be really hyper-personal to you in those moments when you need it most," Ms Rincon adds. Keeping everything on-device is a boon for privacy, but it also means that you're able to use Siri AI at times when you don't have an active internet connection, like when you're travelling on a long-haul flight or holidaying abroad. But the Apple Vice President of Product Marketing for AI tells us about another advantage — the impact on the planet.

Apple has set itself the goal of becoming carbon neutral across every part of its business by 2030. That includes the raw materials used to manufacture its devices, the factories assembling its gadgets, worldwide transportation, Apple's own operations — offices, stores, and data centres, and the electricity used by its devices. We asked Lilian Rincon whether Apple's introduction of complex new AI capabilities would delay that goal?

"No, the good news is that we're still on track for the 2030 goal," the Apple executive told us "The way we've architected [Siri AI and Apple Intelligence] also helps with that.

We do as much as we can on the device, and so that's really using your device to power the intelligence, which is good for the environment." Despite the staggering amount of power inside the Apple-designed silicon in your device — the A20 Pro found inside the new iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max is more powerful than the M1 chipset found inside a MacBook Pro and iMac released just five years ago — there are times when even that isn't enough. For the most complex tasks, Apple has introduced something called Private Cloud Compute, which is designed to offer access to frontier-level intelligence with the same privacy and security promises as on-device crunching on your iPhone. When Private Cloud Compute is handling one of your requests, personal data is not stored or made accessible to Apple or anyone else.

Outside experts can continue to verify this privacy promise at any time. Apple will only send the data required to fulfil your request to Private Cloud Compute. When your request is processed, the response is only sent to you.

It's never stored or accessible to Apple or anyone else. And none of this data is ever used to train future Apple Intelligence models. Lastly, Lilian Rincon revealed her favourite new feature of the swathe of new AI tools now available with iOS 27 and other free software upgrades rolled out by Apple.

"Apple Intelligence is bringing a lot of this next-generation of intelligence to the core apps that you use every day. I think one of the big improvements that you'll hopefully see as you use these apps is that you can use natural language to do really intelligent things. For example, Shortcuts is one of my favourite things.

"You can describe a Shortcut to do anything you need. Recently, for example, I said 'send a text to my partner when I leave work' and it figures out what to do, and it just magically works. But you can also do that in Safari, where you can create extensions to take action on things you want to do on a particular website." Provided your device supports the new Apple Intelligence and Siri AI features, you can download the latest operating system and start testing all of these features and more.

Siri AI will not be available in the European Union for now .