Apple Intelligence notification hallucinations — fabricated BBC news headlines
Date: 2024-12
Affected: Apple iPhone users with Apple Intelligence — BBC and other news sources
Attack vector: hallucination
Category: real-world
Severity: High

Apple's AI-powered notification summarisation feature on iPhone generated fabricated news headlines attributed to the BBC, including false reports about a murder suspect and inaccurate sports scores. The BBC formally complained to Apple, stating the feature risked undermining trust in journalism. Apple acknowledged the issue and added disclaimers to AI-generated summaries.

Impact: BBC formal complaint; journalist credibility concerns; Apple added disclaimers; feature accuracy questioned globally

Mitigations:
Factual consistency validation between source content and generated summary
Do not attribute summarised content to original source without verification
Disable or restrict summarisation for news and safety-critical notification categories
Clear visual distinction between original content and AI-generated summaries

Architectural layers (MAESTRO):
label: Foundation Models
notes: On-device model hallucinated content when summarising push notifications
role: origin
label: Deployment & Infrastructure
notes: Fabricated content displayed as legitimate news notifications to millions of users
role: propagation
label: Evaluation & Observability
notes: No factual consistency check between original notification and generated summary
role: blind-spot