A senior Apple executive has said that the “sexy” parts of life do not belong in computers, and that AI should not be seen as a solution for loneliness, as the company rolled out its new Siri AI chatbot.
Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, said that unlike some mainstream chatbots, Siri AI was designed to be functional and not any kind of ‘companion’. Speaking on the Mostly Human podcast, he said that Siri AI wasn’t designed to promote human connections with chatbots, or the sycophancy that characterises the tone of many of them.
Siri AI launched this month with iOS 26, and Apple is positioning it as a vastly more capable assistant than previous Siri incarnations. The assistant can scan your emails and messages to generate far more contextual responses than before, though Apple hasn’t been especially forthcoming about how that data is handled on-device versus in the cloud.
Federighi said that despite the leap forward in ability, Siri AI was not designed to have more emotional depth than before, or to be able to engage in ‘adult’ topics. Users have already found that Siri AI refuses to engage with explicit topics or sexually explicit requests.
That’s consistent with Apple’s long-standing position, a company that has spent years excluding sextech from the App Store, blocking adult content across its platforms, and most recently piloting device-level age verification on iOS.
Federighi’s comments aren’t a philosophical stance so much as a restatement of existing corporate policy, dressed up for a podcast audience. The more interesting question is what Apple does with the infrastructure it’s building. A company that blocks sextech from its App Store and scans devices for age verification isn’t just declining to participate in the “sexy” parts of life. It’s actively policing them at the platform level. What’s, perhaps, just as notable is how freely competing chatbots handle the same territory.
“The unlock around all of this [AI assistants] is that you get to live the rest of your life, and you get to feel really empowered doing it,” Federighi said on the podcast. “I guess that’s where the sexy part comes in, right? I don’t think the sexy part actually belongs in the computer. It belongs in your life.”
OpenAI recently worked on an ‘adult’ version of ChatGPT that would have been capable of erotic chat, but shelved the project. Meta, meanwhile, recently had to train its AI assistant and chatbots to not have inappropriate conversations with children, after they were found to be engaged in “romantic” and “sensual” conversations with minors.
Federighi said he was against “the idea of AI as a solution for loneliness”. He added that “loneliness is about a lack of connection to real people… [a] real human.”
He said that Siri AI was designed to be the “opposite” of chatbots that are “focused on engagement” and sycophancy to “pull you in”, and induce you to reveal personal information about yourself.
“Siri really wants to say, ‘Listen, that’s not what I’m here for, right? I’m here to help you, I can help you get things done, I can help you learn about the world’,” Federighi said. “But if you try to engage Siri as a romantic partner, Siri is not up for that. Siri is 100 percent not into that.”
Plenty of people do think that the “sexy” parts of life can be facilitated by AI chatbots, as the recent popularity of companion chatbot apps shows. Sextech company Lovense has been investing in its own AI chatbot characters, that sex toy owners give remote ‘control’ of their toys to.
Emotional reliance on AI chatbots has become a regulatory flashpoint in the US, following incidents of chatbot addiction and deaths allegedly linked to it. Recently California introduced a law making chatbot companies legally responsible for implementing usage safeguards, such as reminding users that they aren’t human.
The law, described by lawmakers as the ‘first of its kind’, also makes AI chatbot companies responsible for preventing minors from being exposed to explicit content via the AI platform.
Greg Joswiak, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, said that Siri AI went against the grain of chatbot companies profiting from heightened engagement.
“Some people, their whole business model is about, ‘I need to keep you in what you’re in’,” he said. “That’s not us. So we can truly be built around what the user needs, not, ‘How do we keep you engaged’.”
