No, Apple Intelligence won’t be trained with your data: This is the system Apple will use to improve its AI

Apple is taking a different approach from many tech giants when it comes to training its artificial intelligence. Instead of using your personal data directly, the company has designed a system that uses synthetic content while still capturing real-world trends. The goal is clear: to improve Apple Intelligence without compromising user privacy.

Apple’s synthetic data strategy explained

Apple relies on large sets of synthetic emails to train its AI tools. These are artificially generated messages covering a wide range of topics. Each message is converted into a digital representation, or embedding, capturing its language, subject, and structure.

These embeddings are then sent to a limited number of user devices—only those that have opted into Apple’s Device Analytics. On these devices, the system compares the synthetic embeddings to recent user emails stored locally, using a privacy-preserving method known as differential privacy. No individual email content is shared with Apple.

How Apple refines its training data

By measuring which synthetic embeddings are most similar to user messages, Apple determines which topics are most relevant. The most frequently selected ones are used to generate new synthetic emails—refinements like changing “tennis” to “soccer” in a message, for example.

These refined messages then become part of the next round of training, improving Apple’s AI models used in features like email summarization and writing suggestions. Crucially, Apple never sees your private content, nor does it store or analyze your specific data.

This privacy-first method will be introduced in upcoming betas of iOS 18.5 and macOS 15.5, reinforcing Apple’s commitment to responsible AI development.