Apple Is Paying $250 Million Over Siri. Seven iPhones Qualify, and You Need the Serial Number.

In June 2024, Apple stood on stage and described a version of Siri that could see what was on your screen, act inside your apps and understand what you meant rather than what you said. Then it sold several million iPhones on the strength of that description and did not ship the feature for well over a year.

That sequence is now worth $250 million, and the claims process has opened. If you bought one of seven specific iPhone models inside a nine and a half month window, the money is sitting there waiting for a form. You have until December 21 to fill it in.

What Apple was actually accused of

The complaint is narrower than the headlines suggest. Nobody alleged that Apple Intelligence did not exist. The basic features arrived roughly on schedule: writing tools, notification summaries, the image cleanup in Photos. What did not arrive was the part Apple leaned on hardest in its marketing, the rebuilt Siri with on-screen awareness and in-app actions.

The lawsuit, filed in 2024, argued that Apple advertised those capabilities as features of the iPhone 16 line and the iPhone 15 Pro, that buyers reasonably read that as a description of the phone they were purchasing, and that the AI readiness was a material reason many of them chose those models over cheaper ones. Apple pulled one of the Siri advertisements in spring 2025 after acknowledging the delay, which is roughly where the class period ends.

Apple settled without conceding the point. That is standard, and it is worth understanding what it means for you: the company is not admitting the ads were misleading, and you are not being asked to prove that you personally were misled in any detailed way. You confirm you expected Siri Apple Intelligence features you did not receive, and you confirm the purchase details.

The eligibility test, line by line

All of these have to be true at once. Failing any single one disqualifies the claim.

Two things people get wrong here. The first is the model list: a regular iPhone 15 or 15 Plus does not qualify, because those were never sold as Apple Intelligence devices. The second is the date. June 10, 2024 is the day of the WWDC keynote where Apple Intelligence was announced, which is the point at which the marketing claim entered the world. Anything bought before that is outside the class.

What the payment actually looks like

The number being passed around is $95, and that is the ceiling rather than the expectation. The settlement sets a presumptive payment of $25 per eligible device. That figure moves in both directions depending on how many valid claims arrive.

This is the same arithmetic that makes every consumer class action feel underwhelming when the check arrives. The fund is fixed at $250 million. Costs come off the top. The remainder is split, so the more people who file, the smaller each slice. Filing early does not get you more money, but it does mean you cannot forget.

If you bought more than one eligible phone in the window, a family upgrading together for instance, you claim per device. Three qualifying iPhones is three claims and three payments, which is where this starts to be worth the fifteen minutes.

The timeline, and when money actually moves

The gap between the deadline and the hearing is the part people find frustrating. You file in 2026 and you get paid in 2027, assuming the court grants final approval. There is no mechanism to speed that up. What you can control is the payment method, which you select on the claim form, and some options settle faster than others.

Do not confuse this with the other Siri settlement

The number $95 appearing in both stories is an unhelpful coincidence, and it has produced a lot of confused searching. In the privacy case, $95 million was the size of the whole fund. In this case, $95 is the per-device ceiling.

The wider point about paying for promised features

The reason this settlement is larger than most is that Apple sold hardware on a software promise. That is a fairly new failure mode. Buying a phone used to mean buying a fixed object, and the marketing described what was in the box. Increasingly the marketing describes what the company intends to ship later, and the gap between those two things is now measured in hundreds of millions of dollars.

The rebuilt Siri did eventually arrive with iOS 27, and even now it is not simply switched on for everyone. As we covered when the update landed, the new Siri sits behind a waitlist rather than appearing the moment you install the update. Some buyers from the class period are, in other words, still waiting for the feature they are being compensated for.

Apple has also started drawing lines around how much of the AI you can actually use. There are daily limits on Apple Intelligence requests that Apple will not quantify, with paid tiers signposted for later. That is a different argument from this lawsuit, but it belongs to the same shift: AI features are being treated as a service layered onto the phone rather than a property of it.

It is also worth noting how ordinary these payouts have become. Earlier this week we looked at DoorDash agreeing to pay $131.5 million to 264,000 delivery workers, which works out to a far larger average check than this one. The size of an individual payment tells you about the size of the class, not about the seriousness of the conduct.

What to do, in order

• Check the model. Only the iPhone 15 Pro, 15 Pro Max, 16, 16 Plus, 16e, 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max qualify
• Check the receipt date. The purchase has to fall between June 10, 2024 and March 29, 2025, and it has to have happened in the United States
• Find the serial number. Settings, then General, then About. It is also printed on the original packaging
• File at SmartphoneAISettlement.com. Use the File A Claim option and answer the eligibility questions
• Claim once per device. Multiple qualifying iPhones in the household mean multiple claims
• Do it before December 21, 2026. There is no reason to assume the deadline moves

Fifteen minutes for a payment that might be $25 and might be $95 is not a thrilling return on your afternoon. It is, though, the only part of this story you have any control over. Apple has already decided what it is willing to pay. The only open question is how many of the people it owes will bother to ask.

Sources and further reading

• Engadget: How to get your cut of Apple’s $250 million Siri settlement
• ClassAction.org: $250M iPhone settlement resolves Apple lawsuit over allegedly misrepresented AI features
• Fox Business: Apple’s $250M Siri class action settlement opens claims for iPhone users
• UNILAD Tech: Apple launches official site for iPhone users to claim cash from $250M AI settlement