Tim Cook on Apple Intelligence, AI Fears, the Vision Pro, and His Legacy: The Full Interview
Every time I step onto Apple Park’s circular campus, I’m instantly pulled back to a tour I took months before construction wrapped, when terrazzo floors still held construction dust and the spot where thick, lush greenery now grows was just a mud patch. My guide that day was Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. Beaming with the quiet pride of someone who helped build a decades-long vision from the ground up, he walked me through the $5 billion circular landmark, calling the decision to build the new campus a “100-year bet.”
Today, I’m back at the Ring—seven years after it opened, now buzzing with the constant energy of thousands of employees—to sit down with Cook again. The global tech industry is at a make-or-break turning point right now: today’s largest companies will either fumble the moment, or lock in their dominance for generations. We’re here to talk about Cook’s biggest play in this high-stakes era: the upcoming launch of Apple Intelligence, the company’s first major entry into the red-hot generative AI space. Critics have called it long overdue. For months, Apple’s rivals have dominated headlines, wowed investors, and built massive hype around their AI chatbots, while the world’s most valuable company (as of this writing) was busy showcasing its expensive, bulked-up AR headset. Apple can’t afford to get this AI push wrong. After all, companies are far less likely than well-built buildings to stand tall for a century.
Cook isn’t panicking. Just like his predecessor Steve Jobs, he doesn’t buy the idea that being first to market equals being best. “Classic Apple,” as he puts it, waits while the first wave of players clamors and chaos erupts in a new space, then distinguishes between empty novelty and actual utility to release products that make cutting-edge technology feel accessible, even exciting to everyday users. Think of the iPod and how it reimagined digital music: it wasn’t the first MP3 player ever made, but its compact size, intuitive design, and seamless integration with the iTunes online store created an entirely new way for people to enjoy their music that felt transformative.
Cook also argues Apple has been gearing up for the AI revolution for years. As far back as 2018, he lured John Giannandrea, Google’s top AI executive, to Apple—a hire that marked a rare expansion of the company’s senior leadership team. Next, he scrapped Apple’s long-running secret electric smart car project (an open industry secret Apple never publicly confirmed) and refocused the company’s entire machine learning workforce on building AI capabilities into Apple’s core software products.
In June, Apple unveiled the fruit of that work: a built-in AI layer that works across Apple’s entire product line. Cook also negotiated a partnership with OpenAI, the gold standard for consumer chatbots, so Apple users can opt into access to ChatGPT directly from their devices. I got an early look at several features planned for launch, including a tool that lets you build custom emojis from verbal prompts, and a user-friendly AI image generator called Image Playground. I hadn’t gotten a chance to test Apple’s overhauled Siri, the company’s long-underperforming AI assistant, at the time of our meeting.
What sets Apple’s AI approach apart, at least according to the company, is its laser focus on user privacy—a defining priority of Cook’s tenure as CEO. Most of the new AI tools, which will roll out via software updates for the latest iPhones and recent Mac models, run directly on your device, meaning your personal data never gets sent to cloud servers. For more complex AI tasks that need extra computing power, Cook says all processing happens in encrypted, secure sections of Apple’s data centers.
Another thing that stands out on my return to the Ring is how deftly Cook frames the wins from his biggest bets—from the Apple Watch to his investment in custom Apple silicon, which unlocked major performance gains for iPhones and MacBooks. (He rarely mentions the bets that didn’t work out, like that multibillion-dollar smart car project.) When he walks into the conference room where we’re meeting, he’s as carefully polite as I expected, a product of the Southern manners he picked up growing up in Alabama. He calmly frames Apple’s new products in glowing terms, and deftly pushes back on criticism of the world’s most powerful company. (When we asked for his take on the election results that came in after our interview, he declined to share his personal views.) Where Steve Jobs would approach a journalist like a storm, aggressively pushing his narrative, Cook wraps you in a soft, persuasive fog, sharing confident, enthusiastic assessments of his company’s work.
Ultimately, users will get the final say on Apple Intelligence. But four decades covering Apple has taught me one thing: if this first version of Apple’s AI doesn’t live up to the hype, an unapologetic Cook will take the stage at a future pre-recorded keynote to hail the next update as “the best Apple Intelligence we’ve ever built.” No matter how high the pressure, Tim Cook never lets you see him sweat.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity, combining on-the-record on-camera and off-camera conversations. Watch the full video on WIRED’s YouTube channel.
Full Q&A
Q: When did you first realize generative AI was going to be a transformative, game-changing shift for the industry?
A: I wouldn’t say there was one single “aha!” moment. It built slowly, like a wave rolling in, or distant thunder getting louder. Back in 2017, we integrated a neural engine directly into our chips. Even then it was clear AI and machine learning were going to be huge. It became obvious we needed to reallocate hundreds of our best people to work on it, that this would open a whole new era for our products.
Q: How did you land on what kind of AI product you wanted to build for Apple users?
A: We wanted to innovate in a way that centered two core priorities: personalization and privacy. We started thinking about how those two values intersect, which is classic Apple. How do we deliver this new technology so that it actually benefits people, and makes their daily lives better?
Q: You brand your offering as “Apple Intelligence,” which is very close to “artificial intelligence.” Do you think consumers have real fears about AI, and that this naming helps ease that?
A: I do think that fear exists. We bounced around dozens of names for the offering before landing on Apple Intelligence. It wasn’t a deliberate pun on artificial intelligence, actually. Looking back it feels like the obvious right choice, that’s all.
Q: A lot of other companies are charging extra for AI-enhanced services. Did Apple ever consider a separate subscription fee for Apple Intelligence?
A: We never even talked about charging extra for it. We see it the same way we saw multitouch, the technology that enabled the smartphone revolution and modern tablets: it’s a core foundational feature that should be available to all users.
Q: You’ve been using Apple Intelligence personally for months now. What feature has been the most useful for you day to day?
A: We’re a company that runs on email, and I get thousands of messages every day from users, employees, partners, you name it. Having AI summarize long threads and prioritize your inbox so you don’t have to do all that manual triaging yourself is a total game changer. Then of course there are the fun features, like Image Playground.
Q: You joked once that Apple Intelligence could make you funnier. That caught me off guard—can you expand on that?
A: I think it can help you be more friendly, and that often translates to being funnier, too.
Q: A big concern I have is that if AI is writing for people, communication as we know it will get less authentic. If Apple Intelligence writes a funny message, who actually gets credit for the joke—you, or the AI?
A: It’s still your voice, your message. It’s your ideas and your perspective. Think back to what the personal computer did for productivity: it took over tedious work like manually punching numbers into a calculator, so you could focus on the actual work of building a spreadsheet. It replaced manual typewriters with word processors—that didn’t take away authorship, it made writing easier. Logic Pro helps musicians make music, but they’re still the creator of that music. It’s just a tool.
Q: One of your early demos shows a recent college graduate using Apple Intelligence to polish a rough, casual cover letter into a sharp, professional draft. If I’m a recruiter who hires that graduate, I might feel tricked if their actual writing doesn’t live up to the polished letter the AI wrote. How do you respond to that?
A: I don’t see it that way. Using the tool just makes your ideas more polished. It’s still your choice to use it, and you still edit the final output. It’s like when two people collaborate on a project: one plus one equals more than two, right?
Q: The counterargument here is that we saw this same debate with early search engines: people complained no one bothered to memorize historical dates anymore because they could just look it up, and that we were losing basic skills. Now the same worry applies to writing: why learn to write a professional letter if AI can do it for you?
A: These worries pop up every time a major new technology comes out. I remember when people said calculators would permanently erode people’s math skills. Did that actually happen? Or did calculators just make math more efficient, so people could focus on harder, more interesting problems?
Q: I’ll admit I used to know how to do long division by hand. I can’t anymore.
A: I haven’t forgotten.
Q: Fair, point to you. Another key point about Apple Intelligence is that you already have access to so much of a user’s personal data across their email, calendar, and other Apple services. To make Apple Intelligence useful, you pull all that data together, which makes privacy non-negotiable. Not many other companies can pull this off, because they don’t have Apple’s closed ecosystem, right?
A: We don’t frame it as a benefit of our ecosystem just for the sake of the ecosystem. It’s a way to do more to help people, and make their lives better. And that’s exactly what it does.
Q: Will you open up native Apple apps like Mail and Messages to third-party AI systems? How do you balance access with privacy here?
A: We always weigh the privacy implications of every decision we make. We reject the idea that you have to choose between great privacy and powerful AI. Most of Apple Intelligence runs on-device, but some users need more powerful models for complex tasks. So we built private cloud compute, which has the exact same privacy and security protections as running it on your own device. We kept iterating on this until we got it right.
Q: Let’s shift gears. Apple has spent years designing custom silicon to make your products faster and more efficient. This feels like one of the most underrated parts of Apple’s success over the last 10 years.
A: It’s an enormous enabler for everything else we do. We’ve always believed we should own the core technologies that our products are built on. Steve talked about this all the time. I’m not saying we’ve always done that for every technology, but it’s always been our north star, and it’s been a long journey to get here.
Q: But one big core technology, world-class large language models, you’re outsourcing to OpenAI. When you announced the partnership, it was framed as an initial arrangement. Is it inevitable that Apple will eventually build its own powerful in-house LLMs?
A: I don’t like to predict that far out. We felt OpenAI was the pioneer in this space, and they were ahead. We knew a lot of our users wanted access to the broad world knowledge that OpenAI’s models provide that Apple Intelligence doesn’t cover on its own, and we wanted to integrate it in a smooth way that still lets users choose whether they want to use it or not.
Q: There’s been a lot of talk about a shift in your relationship with OpenAI. Originally you were supposed to get an observer seat on their board, that fell through. There were rumors you would participate in their latest big funding round, you didn’t. OpenAI has had major leadership turnover, and regulators are looking at whether AI power is too concentrated in a few hands. Has your relationship with OpenAI cooled at all?
A: None of that speculation is true. I’ll just say our standard approach is not to go out and invest in a bunch of other companies. We rarely do that, so it would be an exception for us to invest in OpenAI.
Q: So you never even considered investing in OpenAI?
A: I’m not going to say we never looked at it. I’m just saying it would be a very rare move for us. The only big one we did back in the day was ARM. Maybe one or two others, that’s it.
Q: ARM turned out pretty well for you.
A: It did turn out pretty well. [In 1990, Apple put $3 million into ARM for a 30% stake—an investment that would later be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. More importantly, ARM has remained a critical chip supplier for Apple, most notably for the iPhone.]
Q: One big difference between Apple and OpenAI is that OpenAI is obsessed with building artificial general intelligence, or AGI. You almost never hear Apple talk about AGI. Do you think AGI is actually achievable?
A: Right now, the technology is good enough that we can deliver it to people and improve their lives today, and that’s what we’re focused on. We’ll keep pushing the technology forward and see where it takes us.
Q: If AGI does become a reality, how do you think that will change Apple as a company?
A: That’s a conversation we’ll continue to have as the technology evolves.
Q: When you’re thinking about the future late at night, do you ever stop to wonder what superhuman artificial intelligence would mean for the world?
A: Of course I do, not just for Apple, but for all of humanity. There is so much incredible good that AI can do for people. Are there areas where we need clear guardrails? Of course. We think very deeply about what we should and shouldn’t do as a company, and I hope other companies do the same. AGI is still a long way off, at minimum. We’ll work out what guardrails we need as we go.
Q: Rolling out generative AI puts a lot of extra strain on your infrastructure, requiring more data centers and more energy. Does this set back Apple’s goal of being completely carbon neutral by 2030?
A: It does create extra challenges, yes. But are we walking away from our goal? No, not at all. When we build new data centers, we power them with renewable energy, and we’ve built up the expertise and supply chains to do this now. Since 2015, our overall carbon footprint is down by more than half, while our net sales have grown by more than 50%. I feel very confident we’ll hit our 2030 goal.
Q: So you won’t have to restart old nuclear power plants to hit that goal, right?
A: I don’t see that happening.
Q: The iPhone has completely transformed daily life, but a lot of people worry that it’s made us more addicted to our devices, more distracted, and worse at focusing. In a recent informal survey, teachers at top colleges said their students can no longer focus on reading long books. As the person who makes and sells these devices, do you share this worry?
A: I do worry about endless mindless scrolling. That’s exactly why we built features like Screen Time, to help people manage their use. We support users setting their own limits, like cutting down on the number of notifications you get. We’ve built a lot of powerful parental controls too. My core belief is that if you’re looking at your phone more than you’re looking the person you’re with in the eye, that’s a problem.
Q: Steve Jobs famously told you not to second-guess your decisions by imagining what he would do, just do what you think is right. But Steve hated extra buttons on the iPhone—did you have a moment where you looked up and apologized to him for adding a new camera control button to the iPhone 16?
A: I don’t know what Steve would have thought. I worked with him for a long time, so I have my own sense of his priorities, but at the end of the day, people take so many photos and videos with their iPhones now, it was important to make that access simple and elegant. It was such a big improvement that it justified adding the camera control button.
Q: Let’s talk about the Vision Pro, Apple’s AR headset. Reports say sales have been lower than your internal projections. What happened there?
A: It’s always been an early adopter product, for people who want to use tomorrow’s technology today. Those people are buying it, and the developer ecosystem for Vision Pro is growing really fast. The ultimate test for us is how the ecosystem grows, and it’s going well. I don’t know if you use it much, but I’m on it all the time. I see new apps launching for it every week.
Q: I heard Stevie Wonder got an early demo of the Vision Pro and loved it. How did that work for him, and what did you learn from that?
A: He’s a friend of Apple, and getting feedback from him is always incredible. His artistry is just unmatched. One of the core principles Apple has always had is that we don’t add accessibility as an afterthought at the end of the design process—we build it into the product from day one. So his feedback was really key for us as we refined the Vision Pro’s accessibility features.
Q: Meta and Snap are working on lightweight mixed-reality glasses that people can wear all day. Is the bulkier Vision Pro just the first step toward that thinner, wearable end goal?
A: Yes, it’s a progression over time, as we refine the form factor. AR is an incredibly big deal. With Vision Pro, we’ve built the most advanced technology we’ve ever created as a company, and I think it’s the most advanced consumer electronics product in the world right now. We’ll keep iterating and see where it goes.
Q: Apple has built a lot of consumer health tools into your devices over the last few years. What’s your long-term strategy for biometric tracking and medical technology, including things like prosthetics?
A: If I zoom way out into the future, I think when people look back at Apple’s biggest contribution to the world, it will be in health. That’s what I truly believe. When we started this journey