Apple has sent out release candidate builds of the upcoming iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS 15.3 updates to developers today. But they come with one tweak that hasn't been reported on, per MacRumors: They enable all of the AI-powered Apple Intelligence features by default during setup. When Apple Intelligence was initially released in iOS 18.1, the features were off by default, unless users chose to opt-in and enable them.
Those who still wish to opt out of Apple Intelligence features will now have to do it after their devices are set up by navigating to the Apple Intelligence & Siri section in the Settings app.
Apple Intelligence will only be enabled by default for hardware that supports it. For the iPhone, that's just the iPhone 15 Pro series, iPhone 16 series, and iPhone 16 Pro series. It goes further back on the iPad and Mac—Apple Intelligence works on any model with an M1 processor or newer.
Apple is following in the footsteps of Microsoft and Google here, rolling out new generative AI features to its user base as quickly as possible and enabling some or all of them by default while still labeling everything as a "beta" and pointing to that label when things go wrong. Case in point: The iOS 18.3 update also temporarily disables all notification summaries for apps in the App Store's "news and entertainment" category, because some of those summaries contained major factual inaccuracies.
That said, Apple has rolled out new features this way before. When Siri launched on the iPhone 4S in 2011, it was labeled as a "beta," and Apple pointed to that label when the feature was criticized. Siri would quietly drop the beta label in 2013.
Aside from the Apple Intelligence change, the iOS 18.3 update is otherwise relatively low-key, focusing mostly on bug fixes and security updates. Users of the new iPhone 16 models get new "Visual Intelligence" features that can add an event to your calendar based on the contents of a flyer or identify plants and animals in a given image. And there are several changes to how Notification Summaries work, besides the ones for news apps being turned off: You can disable summaries for individual apps from the lock screen, and summaries now use italicized text to help visually separate them from regular notifications. Mac users will also get the "Genmoji" feature, which the iPhone and iPad got in iOS/iPadOS 18.2.