Apple Denies Fraud Allegations Over Siri Delays
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Many customers and investors were understandably upset when Apple failed to deliver on its promised Siri improvements last spring, leading to at least two class-action lawsuits. While customers accused the company of falsely advertising the features for the iPhone 16 to sell more products, a group of shareholders claimed they’d been defrauded by Apple’s lofty promises on what Siri would be capable of doing.
Now, Apple has filed an initial rebuttal to the shareholder case, asking a federal judge to dismiss the proposed class action on the basis that it didn’t knowingly mislead customers or investors when it showed off Apple Intelligence during its 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).
In addition to Siri’s failure to launch, the lawsuit also claims that Apple defrauded shareholders by misrepresenting how it had complied with a 2021 injunction to allow third-party payment links in the App Store — a situation that also resulted in a scathing ruling and stricter sanctions in April 2025 and a billion-dollar class action by developers who claimed Apple’s attempts to skirt the terms of the injunction had cost them “hundreds of millions to billions” in revenue.
While that developer case is still winding its way through the courts, the shareholder class action suit, which is led by South Korea’s National Pension Service, is now facing its first challenge, with Apple petitioning the courts to reject it outright before it goes to trial.
According to Reuters, Apple filed a request on Wednesday in the San Jose, California, federal court, claiming that, while investors had been understandably upset by the stock drop after Apple announced the new Siri would be delayed, they hadn’t supplied any evidence that Apple knew its attempts to deliver on the promised Siri improvements would take longer than expected.
“It is no secret that Apple faced challenges and weathered ups and downs in its stock price in 2025, like many major companies,” Apple says in the filing. “But plaintiff takes a massive and unsupported leap by claiming that securities fraud caused the temporary price drops.”
There’s also a fair bit of emphasis on the word “temporary” here. Despite the 2025 turbulence, Apple’s stock is now sitting at roughly $272 per share, which is a healthy increase from the $183 it was sitting at when it first teased the new Siri features nearly two years ago. This makes it hard for the plaintiffs to claim that they’ve suffered long-term harm unless they can somehow prove that the stock would have risen even more strongly otherwise — something that’s virtually impossible to do without a crystal ball.
Apple showed off Apple Intelligence during its 2024 WWDC keynote, demonstrating a number of features that did ship in various iOS 18 point releases, including Writing Tools, Image Playground, and Genmoji. While a more personalized Siri was expected to be part of these, with insiders pegging it for the iOS 18.4 update in early 2025, Apple was forced to admit that it was going to need some more time in the oven and would be delayed until early 2026. While a new deal with Google to use Gemini technology gave us hope that it would land in iOS 26.4, it seems Apple is still facing a few bumps in the road, although the company insists it’s still on track for this year.
In the same petition, Apple also maintains that it never guaranteed that its compliance with the 2021 injunction would be “foolproof.” That injunction required that Apple allow developers to offer external links for purchases that could bypass Apple’s App Store payment system, thereby avoiding paying a 15-30% cut to Apple to all in-app purchases.
Apple appealed that ruling, delaying enforcement until January 16, 2024, when the Supreme Court declined to hear its final appeal, effectively bringing the injunction back into force. However, since the original injunction didn’t prohibit Apple from collecting a commission on these in-app purchases, it announced it would charge a 27% commission on all purchases made outside the App Store — effectively the same 30% commission minus the typical fees for credit card processing.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, who had brought the case against Apple that resulted in the injunction, took umbrage to that policy, accusing Apple of malicious compliance and taking it back to court, where Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who had presided over the first case, harshly sanctioned Apple, saying it “thwarted the Injunction’s goals, and continued its anticompetitive conduct solely to maintain its revenue stream.”
Judge Rogers issued a new injunction that prohibited it from collecting any commissions at all on purchases made outside of the App Store — a decision that was partially overturned on appeal. While the 9th Circuit largely upheld the contempt finding in December, it threw Apple a lifeline by ruling that the company is entitled to a “reasonable” commission for its intellectual property, but it bounced the case back down to the lower court, leaving it to decide what that number should look like. However, Apple remains barred from charging any commission at all until that happens.
Analysts estimate that Apple’s App Store commissions make up about 25 percent of its overall services revenue, which rose to $30 billion in the first quarter of 2026, eclipsing every other product category except for the iPhone, which still makes up roughly half of Apple’s overall revenue. With that in mind, it’s understandable how shareholders would naturally be a bit nervous about the back and forth on whether Apple will be able to continue collecting these fees, and how much it will actually be able to get away with charging.
