Every AI post-mortem is about a system that ran and failed. This one is about a feature that never ran at all, and it still has a price: plaintiffs' experts put the enhanced-Siri promise at 5.5% of the phone, or $61.06 a device across 37 million of them.
Somewhere in a 38-page motion filed in the Northern District of California there is a number that deserves more attention than the settlement it sits inside. Plaintiffs' experts, working from Apple's own produced sales data, estimated that the difference between an iPhone that "Includes Basic Siri" and one that "Includes an AI Enhanced Siri" was worth 5.5% of the price of the phone (Dkt. 77, p. 28). On an average sale of about $1,110, that is $61.06 per device. Across roughly 37 million eligible devices, it is $2,264,064,781 (p. 28).
The enhanced Siri that buyers were paying for did not exist. Apple has now agreed to pay $250,000,000 into a non-reversionary settlement fund rather than test that number at trial (p. 2). The buyers, if they file a claim, get a presumptive $25 each (p. 16).
Every AI post-mortem worth reading is about a system that ran and failed: the tool that was never validated outside its own hospital, the model whose override was switched off, the approval screen that never showed the amount. This one is about a system that never ran at all, and it still has a price, a class, and a docket number. The liability was not in the model. It was in the roadmap.
The feature that was advertised before it existed
The case is Landsheft v. Apple Inc., No. 5:25-cv-02668. The class is buyers of every iPhone 16 model and certain iPhone 15 models between June 10, 2024 and March 29, 2025 (p. 9). The allegation is stated plainly in the motion: Apple "showcased a fully operable Enhanced Siri features in its marketing campaign even though the feature did not yet exist" (p. 9). In March 2025, "Apple informed consumers that Enhanced Siri features would not be delivered until a future date" (p. 11).
The roadmap language had already been adjudicated once, by a body that prices nothing. The Better Business Bureau's National Advertising Division, an industry self-regulatory panel, reviewed the campaign and found, in the motion's words, that "Apple's claim that Apple Intelligence is 'available now' conveyed that the updated Siri was available at launch, when it was not" (p. 11). That is the entire dispute in one clause. "Available now" is a tense. The feature was in a different one.
Nothing in the motion says the demos were fake in the sense of fabricated footage. The complaint's theory is narrower and, for anyone who ships software, more familiar: a demo of a capability that has not shipped is a demo of a plan, and the copy around it dropped the word "plan."
How you price a promise
The interesting work in the filing is not the settlement. It is the damages model that the settlement is measured against.
The plaintiffs retained two experts. One, Steven Gaskin, ran a conjoint analysis: a survey method that shows respondents phones with different combinations of attributes and prices, and infers from their choices how much of the price they attribute to each attribute. The attribute in question was the Siri line on the spec sheet, and the result was that moving a phone from "Includes Basic Siri" to "Includes an AI Enhanced Siri" carried a price premium of "5.5% of the overall cost of the device" (p. 28, citing Gaskin Decl. ¶ 56).
The second expert, Colin Weir, turned the premium into dollars using data Apple itself produced in discovery: an average sales price of approximately $1,110 across approximately 37 million eligible devices, "a total damages scenario of approximately $2,264,064,781 across the class, or a $61.06 per device" (p. 28, citing Weir Decl. ¶¶ 67-68). The arithmetic is internally consistent to a cent of rounding: 5.5% of $1,110 is $61.05.
Two things about that number need saying at once, and the motion says both of them.
First, it is a litigation position. It is the plaintiffs' experts' estimate, in a motion asking a court to approve a settlement, and it is not a finding of fact or an admission by anyone. The same page records Apple's answer: that it "anticipates delivering additional Siri" features, and that "any premium for delayed features might be smaller than the 5.5% for non-delivered features" (p. 28). Delay and non-delivery are different products, and Apple's position is that it sold the first.
Second, and this is the part worth sitting with, the number did not come from an engineer's estimate of what the feature would have cost to build, or from an analyst's guess at its value. It came from what buyers revealed they would pay for the words on the box. The promise worked. It moved the price. That is why it became expensive: the more persuasive the roadmap copy, the larger the premium a conjoint study will find attached to it, and the larger the exposure when the tense proves wrong.
What the settlement actually says
Set the claimed exposure beside the settlement and the proportions are ordinary. $250 million is 11.0% of the $2.26 billion damages scenario. Settling a consumer class action for a tenth of the plaintiffs' best-case number is a normal outcome, not a confession, and the motion does not concede that the model is right.
Per device, the gap is wider. The presumptive payment is $25 per eligible device, with a per-device cap of $95 (p. 16). Twenty-five dollars is 41% of the experts' $61.06. The fund is gross; class members are paid from the net amount after fees and costs, which is what "presumptive" is doing in that sentence. The cap exists because, in consumer settlements, most eligible buyers never file, and the money that goes unclaimed by some raises what the rest can receive.
Two traps sit one search away from this story, and both are worth naming so the reader does not fall into them. The first is that a separate case, over Siri recording conversations, settled for $95 million: different conduct, different case, different money, and the $95 per-device cap here makes the collision easy to make. The second is the status of this settlement. Dkt. 77 is a motion for preliminary approval. As of this writing, the deal has been proposed to the court; it is not final, and final approval is a separate hearing that the docket will record when it happens.
The failure mode is new, and it lives in the roadmap
Operators already know the distinction this case turns on. Engineering knows the difference between demoed and shipped; every team has a word for a feature that works on the presenter's laptop and nowhere else. The distinction is erased downstream, in copy, by a tense. "Available now" is the cheapest phrase in marketing and, on this record, the most expensive.
What is new is that the erasure has been given a price, and the price was derived from the seller's own customers. Earlier AI failures in the public record cost money because a system did something: approved a wire, mispriced a house, missed a diagnosis. Here nothing was done. The system's absence was the harm, and the harm was measured by the gap between what people paid and what they got. For anyone shipping an AI roadmap, this is the first well-documented price on a promise that is not yet true.
The practical lesson is dull, which is the usual sign that it is correct. Roadmap copy needs the same tense discipline as a changelog. Shipped, in testing, and planned are three different claims with three different prices, and a demo should carry the date of the "now" it is demonstrating. An industry panel found the phrase misleading before any court did; the panel's finding cost Apple nothing, and the court's attention cost it a quarter of a billion dollars. The cheap correction was available for nine months.
What this piece does not claim
It does not claim that a court found Apple's AI promise to be worth $2.26 billion; that figure is the plaintiffs' expert model, and Apple contests it. It does not claim that Apple admitted anything; the settlement is a payment, not a concession, and 11% of a claimed exposure is an ordinary place for one to land. It does not claim the settlement is final. And it does not claim that the $95 million Siri privacy settlement has anything to do with this one beyond sharing a product name.
What it does claim is narrow. A capability that did not exist was priced, by experts, from the seller's own data, at 5.5% of the phone; a regulator had already ruled the phrase that sold it misleading; and the seller paid rather than let a jury test the number.
Reproduction: every figure above is either quoted from the filing at the page cited or computed by verify_apple_numbers.py in this essay's run directory, which re-fetches Dkt. 77 from CourtListener's RECAP archive and re-extracts each figure from the PDF on every run (it refuses rather than restating a number if the docket changes). Run on 2026-08-28: 38 pages; every figure found at its cited page; $250,000,000 / $2,264,064,781 = 11.0%; $25 / $61.06 = 41%; 5.5% × $1,110 = $61.05 against the filing's $61.06.
Sources: Landsheft v. Apple Inc., No. 5:25-cv-02668 (N.D. Cal.), Dkt. 77, "Notice of Motion and Motion for Preliminary Approval of Class Action Settlement," 38 pp., via CourtListener RECAP (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.446692/gov.uscourts.cand.446692.77.0_1.pdf): settlement fund p. 2; class period, devices and the "did not yet exist" allegation p. 9; the NAD "available now" finding and the March 2025 delay notice p. 11; presumptive payment and cap p. 16; the conjoint premium (Gaskin Decl. ¶ 56), the damages build (Weir Decl. ¶¶ 67-68) and Apple's "smaller than the 5.5%" response p. 28; the experts are identified by name (Steven Gaskin, Colin Weir) at p. 2 and p. 28. Case docket: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69759747/landsheft-v-apple-inc/. TechCrunch, "Apple to pay $250M to settle lawsuit over Siri's delayed AI features," May 6, 2026: secondary, used only to locate the case; no figure in this piece is taken from it.
A roadmap claim has a date. Most records of one do not.
The dispute above turns on a tense: what was true at the moment the copy said it. That is a provenance question, and it is answered by what the record can still show about when a claim was made and what stood behind it then. Chain of Consciousness is a tamper-evident record written as the work happens rather than reconstructed once somebody asks, so “shipped” and “planned” stay distinguishable after the fact instead of collapsing into whatever the current page says.
Hosted Chain of Consciousness · Verify a record
pip install chain-of-consciousness · npm install chain-of-consciousness
