Apple may face new shareholder scrutiny over its AI practices following a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The document was filed ahead of Apple’s next Annual Shareholder Meeting that’s scheduled for February 25 at 8 a.m. PT.
The National Legal and Policy Center has submitted a proposal urging Apple to disclose how it acquires and uses external data for AI training. The filing, disclosed on the SEC’s website, highlights potential legal risks tied to data privacy and intellectual property rights. That’s despite Apple’s brand alignment with privacy-centric policies.
What’s in the proposal?
The NLPC’s proposal, listed as Proposal No. 4 in Apple’s 2025 proxy materials, requests that Apple produce a report outlining its policies on AI data acquisition and ethics. Specifically, the NLPC wants Apple to address:
The risks associated with improperly obtained data used to train AI models.
Apple’s privacy safeguards in AI development.
Measures taken to ensure AI-generated outputs comply with legal and ethical standards.
The NLPC argues that Apple, as a leading technology company with a reputation for user privacy, should set a higher standard in AI ethics. The proposal notes that competitors, including OpenAI, Google, and Meta, are already facing lawsuits over allegedly unauthorized data scraping to train AI models.
In fact, the NLPC pulls no punches in how it summarizes Apple’s AI development strategy:
The Company presents itself as privacy-friendly– to great success – but the monetization potential of its massive userbase is too high to pass up, so Apple outsources its unethical practices to other parties.
For example, the Company has a longstanding partnership with Alphabet – one of Apple’s major competitors – to make Google the default search algorithm on Apple products. The deal is estimated to be worth $25 billion to Apple, which is 20% of its pretax profit. Not only does the partnership generate antitrust scrutiny, but it provides Alphabet the opportunity to collect massive amounts of data on Apple users. Alphabet is known for a wide variety of ethical and privacy violations. In effect, Apple has outsourced its unethical activities to Alphabet while collecting substantial sums in the process.
This is the playbook that Apple is attempting to run with AI. In addition to its partnership with OpenAI, Apple has explored a partnership with Meta, another serial privacy violator.
What this means for Apple
Apple has so far taken a more restrained approach to AI than some of its rivals, focusing on on-device intelligence and privacy-centric machine learning rather than large-scale, cloud-based AI models.
Specifically, Apple has touted its Private Cloud Compute model that is designed to transmit and contain no account data when using Apple Intelligence.
However, Apple’s privacy policy ends when Apple Intelligence relies on partner integration. For now, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the only partner, but Apple has openly courted Google for Gemini integration in the future.
Apple explicitly requires user permission to turn on third-party AI integration with Apple Intelligence — not just upon first use.
What happens next?
For starters, the proposal will almost certainly be voted down. Apple usually advises against supporting shareholder proposals, and shareholder proposals fail as a result. We’ll keep you posted on what happens next month.
Still, the pointed accusation of outsourcing “unethical practices” for developing AI technology carries a sting — especially when analysts are praising Apple for not wasting money on catching up with AI competitors and instead serving them up on Apple platforms.
What do you think? Should Apple disclose more about its AI training data? Let us know in the comments below.
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