AI News Summaries Return in iOS 26 Beta 4
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Apple has just released the fourth developer beta of iOS 26, and if rumors are true, it will soon be followed by a public beta. While we’re down to the typical refinements and polish at this stage of the beta cycle, today’s update did pack in one fascinating surprise: the return of the much-maligned Apple Intelligence news summaries.
AI-powered notification summaries were one of the smaller tentpoles of Apple Intelligence when Apple unveiled its new features last year. However, not long after those arrived with the release of iOS 18.2 in December, many folks began noticing that the summaries range from being a bit off to being downright misleading.
This was bad enough when dealing with things like messages from friends and family, but it ultimately became a serious deal-breaker for news sources, where headlines sometimes morphed into presenting factually incorrect information.
The poster child for these notifications came when the BBC raised serious concerns about Apple Intelligence misreading a notification from its iPhone news app to erroneously report that Luigi Magnione, the alleged killer of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson, had shot himself, despite being merely incarcerated and quite alive.
We never found out what the original notification would have said had Apple Intelligence not mangled it into something unrecognizable, so it’s unclear how it could have possibly gotten things so wrong. However, it didn’t really matter how it happened; the fact that it did was a problem.
This wasn’t an isolated incident, merely one of the more serious ones. An AI-summarized notification from the New York Times also appeared to say that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested, presumably misreading an article about an arrest warrant that the International Criminal Court had issued.
However, the BBC took the matter seriously enough to reach out to Apple in December to raise its concerns and insist that the problem be addressed. Apple didn’t comment publicly right away, but in early January, the iPhone maker announced that it was working on a fix.
At that time, Apple implied that it was merely planning to “further clarify when the text being displayed is summarization provided by Apple Intelligence.” Still, some organizations, including Reporters Without Borders (RSF), had already called on Apple to remove the AI-powered summaries entirely, declaring them a threat to reliable journalism.
Whether or not Apple was responding to that specific criticism, this is ultimately what the company did. Ten days after it promised to address the issue, a third iOS 18.3 beta arrived with AI news summaries switched off.
Apple took a somewhat brute force approach, disabling AI-generated notifications for all apps classified as “News and Entertainment.” Other categories, such as communications and social apps, were left untouched. However, the news and entertainment category still cut a wide swath, not only impacting apps like BBC, CNN, and The New York Times, but also Apple Music, Podcasts, and streaming apps like Disney+, Plex, and YouTube.
This has remained the state of affairs throughout the rest of the iOS 18 cycle. However, it appears that Apple is taking a stab at bringing back AI-summarized headlines in iOS 26, as today’s fourth developer beta not only re-enables these but actively prompts users to set them up during the onboarding process after the update has finished installing.
It’s essentially the same screen that appeared in iOS 18.2 when notification summaries debuted, and then again in iOS 18.3 when news and entertainment apps were excluded. Now, it’s possible to turn them on again, but Apple has added a red warning to advise users that “Summarization may change the meaning of the original headlines. Verify information.”
Once you’re past that screen, there are no other explicit warnings about news and entertainment apps; just the standard “Summaries may contain errors” at the top of the Summarize Notifications screen in the Settings app. However, toggling notification summaries off entirely and then turning them back on again will present the standard onboarding screen with the red warning about headlines when the News & Entertainment category is selected.
Since this is still in beta, it’s likely that Apple plans to use the next few weeks to gather feedback from developers and public beta testers, giving it more time to refine things before the final iOS 26 release in September. It’s also entirely possible this feature could be pulled if things don’t go as well as Apple hopes.
