The BBC has complained to Apple after the tech giant’s new iPhone feature generated a false headline about a high-profile murder in the US.

Apple Intelligence launched in the UK earlier this weekuses artificial intelligence (AI) to summarize and group notifications.

This week, the AI-powered roundup falsely made it appear as if BBC News had published an article claiming that Luigi Mangione, the man arrested after the murder of health insurer CEO Brian Thompson in New York, killed himself shot. He doesn’t have that.

A BBC spokesperson said the company had contacted Apple “to address these concerns and resolve the issue.”

Apple declined to comment.

“BBC News is the most trusted news media in the world,” the BBC spokesperson added.

“It is important to us that our audiences can trust any information or journalism published on our behalf, and this includes notifications.”

The message, which made a false claim about Mangione, included otherwise accurate summaries about the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and an update on South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.

But the BBC doesn’t appear to be the only news publisher to have its headlines misrepresented by Apple’s new AI technology.

On November 21, three New York Times articles on different topics were combined into one alert – one section said “Netanyahu arrested,” referring to the Israeli prime minister.

This was an inaccurate summary of a newspaper report about the International Criminal Court issuing an arrest warrant against Netanyahu and not a report on his arrest.

The error has been highlighted on Bluesky by a journalist from the US investigative journalism website ProPublica.

The BBC was unable to independently verify the screenshot and The New York Times declined to comment to BBC News.

Apple says one of the reasons people might like the AI-powered notification summaries is that they help reduce interruptions caused by ongoing notifications and give the user the ability to prioritize more important notifications.

It is only available on certain iPhones – those using system version iOS 18.1 or later on newer devices (all iPhone 16 phones, the 15 Pro and the 15 Pro Max). It’s also available on some iPads and Macs.

Prof. Petros Iosifidis, a professor of media policy at City University of London, told BBC News that Apple’s mistake was “embarrassing.”

“I can see the pressure of being first to market, but I’m surprised that Apple would put its name on such a demonstrably half-baked product,” he said.

“Yes, potential benefits are there – but the technology is not there yet and there is a real risk of disinformation spreading.”

The grouped notifications are marked with a specific icon and users can report any concerns they have in a notification summary on their devices. Apple did not specify how many reports it received.

Not only does Apple Intelligence summarize articles from publishers, but summaries of emails and text messages have also been reported have occasionally not quite hit the mark.

And this isn’t the first time a major tech company has discovered that AI summaries don’t always work.

In May, Google, using its AI internet search overview tool based on “isolated examples,” said some users looking for ways to make cheese stick to pizza should consider using “non-toxic glue.”

The search engine’s AI-generated answers also said it Geologists recommend that people eat one stone per day.