Apple Intelligence news notification summaries have been suspended

For over a year, artificial intelligence has been at the centre of most consumer technology launches. It's absolutely everywhere, from the latest phones and tablets, to smartwatches and laptops.

It's something you can choose to opt in or out of, but AI is still the focus of new products, whether its the new camera tricks it can offer, or the rewriting of emails and messages you can ask it to do. That applies for all major tech giants too, from Apple and Samsung, to Google and Microsoft.

Apple was one of the later companies to hop on the AI bandwagon, having only released Apple Intelligence – its version of AI – to iPhone users in December last year. In that time however, it has faced criticism for some of the summaries Apple Intelligence generated from news app notifications.

What is the Apple Notification Summary feature and why is it being turned off?

The notification summary feature arrived with iOS 18.2 and enabled Apple Intelligence to summarise multiple notifications from the same app, whether that be BBC News, WhatsApp or LinkedIn. It put stories into one notification for each, making them more digestible for the user. Sometimes, it does a decent job, but as with many AI services, there are times when it's proved to be far off the mark.

As highlighted by a report on the BBC, one of the summaries generated from a BBC News headline went from "CEO shooting suspect Luigi Mangione in angry outburst outside court as he fights extradition to New York - follow live" to "Luigi Mangione shoots himself; Syrian mother hopes Assad pays price; South Korea police raid Yoon Suk Yeol's office".

It's the beginning of that summary that was the issue, with the BBC subsequently complaining to Apple suggesting the AI feature wasn't ready and it was adding to issues of misinformation. According to the Beeb, there were also inaccurate summaries of Sky News headlines, as well as the New York Times and Washington Post.

In the latest report from the BBC surrounding the issue, it's been confirmed that the notification summary feature will be disabled by Apple for news and entertainment apps. An Apple spokesperson said: "With the latest beta software releases of iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS Sequoia 15.3, notification summaries for the news and entertainment category will be temporarily unavailable".

Apple also said that AI summaries of other app alerts will appear with italicised text, presumably to help users differentiate between AI-generated and non-AI notifications.

Currently, the notification summary created by Apple Intelligence is indicated with a couple of lines and an arrow, though you can turn the feature off yourself entirely should you wish to.

If you want to turn it off, open settings on your iPhone, head to notifications and tap on 'Summarise Notifications'. You can then turn the summaries off entirely, or on an app-by-app basis.