Brussels’ AI Catch-22: Siri, Define ‘Choice’
Did Apple jump, or was it pushed?
That is the question Brussels would rather not answer after Apple announced that its new Siri AI features will not ship on iPhones and iPads in the European Union. The European Commission says Apple made a free choice. Apple’s actual choice was between opening the iPhone in ways that could break the privacy-and-security model its customers buy, shipping a product that would invite enforcement, or not shipping at all.
Call it innovation by ultimatum.
At Tuesday’s midday press briefing, European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier offered Brussels’ official explanation:
The decision not to allow Siri AI in the EU is Apple’s and Apple’s only… Absolutely nothing in the DMA prohibits Apple from introducing new products in the EU… What Apple is, however, not allowed to do is to close the market. It’s not for them to choose which AI tools our EU citizens get to use or not… EU law is non-negotiable.
Regnier capped the intervention with an analogy: the Commission grants no exemptions, just as a police officer does not exempt a driver from the speed limit.
The problem is that nearly every clause of his statement gets the economics backward.
The Commission’s framing is that Apple faced a free choice and chose spite. The reality is closer to a catch-22. Under the Commission’s interpretation of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), Apple could open its operating system in ways that compromise the security architecture its customers pay for—and that European Union privacy law itself demands—or it could preserve that architecture and ship nothing.
Apple chose the only option that was both lawful and commercially rational: it withheld the product. When a regulatory regime is structured so that the only safe harbor is nonparticipation, the claim that “nothing prohibits you from introducing new products” is technically true but substantively empty.
To see why, it helps to recall what actually happened. It also requires asking a question the Commission has studiously avoided: If the open, deeply interoperable, agent-accessible operating system Brussels demands is both commercially viable and consistent with the rest of EU law, why has no one—on any platform, anywhere in the world—ever built one?