The BBC isn’t pleased with Apple Intelligence’s notification summary feature. The corporation says that the notification summary feature “generated a false headline” about Lugi Magione, who was arrested this week as the suspected killer of the United HealthGroup CEO.
The notification summary in question suggested that Mangione had shot himself: “Luigi Mangione shoots himself; Syrian mother hopes Assad pays the price; South Korea police raid Yoon Suk Yeol’s office.”
The summarize notifications feature is part of Apple Intelligence, introduced with iOS 18.1. Notification summaries appear at the top of a stack of notifications from the same app. Users can tap on the summary to reveal the full notifications stack and view each one’s original text.
Apple Intelligence appears to have summarized three headline notifications from the BBC News app, each separated by a semi-colon in the summary. The BBC hasn’t shared the full text of the original notification about Luigi Mangione that led to this false summary.
The Apple Intelligence summary correctly summarized the two other headlines (one about Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and another about South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol).
“BBC News is the most trusted news media in the world,” a BBC spokesperson said in a statement. “It is essential to us that our audiences can trust any information or journalism published in our name and that includes notifications.”
The BBC says it has contacted Apple “to raise this concern and fix this problem.” Apple has not commented.
Additionally, the BBC pointed to a post on Bluesky that shows Apple Intelligence mischaracterizing a New York Times headline about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
These types of problems aren’t exclusive to Apple Intelligence and can impact anything that is powered by a large language model. If the BBC were to provide the full text of the original notification, it would be easier to see where exactly Apple Intelligence’s summary went wrong.
You can manage which notifications are summarized on your iPhone by going to the Settings app, tapping “Notifications,” and then tapping “Summarize Notifications.”
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