In my informed opinion from 34 years of full-time work exploring, writing about, and analyzing Apple technologies. I’m pushing back on this because encouraging paranoia about unrealistic threats makes it harder for people to take the real threats seriously.
You can imagine any bogeyman you like, but the idea that Apple Intelligence could be undermined for significantly malicious purposes is unrealistic. Even if we assume that all of Apple’s security measures—such as the signed system volume, sandboxing, and notarization—could be compromised, it’s difficult to see how the exposure of Apple Intelligence would pose a serious security or privacy threat because it operates entirely on-device or through Apple’s Private Cloud Compute. At worst, a compromise of Apple Intelligence could:
- Inject unwanted text into notification or message summaries?
- Make Clean Up replace removed objects with dirty pictures?
- Replace photos in Memories movies with something else?
It’s little more than digital graffiti, because that’s all Apple Intelligence can do. Any threat actor with the technical knowledge, skills, and attack vector to breach Apple’s security would be far more interested in exfiltrating confidential information like passwords or financial data, encrypting data for ransomware use, or some similar action that would have political or financial gain.
There are many real Internet threats, but as I said, this is not the topic to discuss them.
