Apple's upcoming AI shopping assistant likely to use your chat history, here's why

Apple has quietly revealed plans for a new virtual shopping assistant in the Apple Store app, not through an announcement but buried in updated privacy policy language.

MacRumors first spotted the undocumented feature on July 22, suggesting Apple is testing the shopping assistant with select users before wider rollout.

How does the Virtual Shopping Assistant feature work?

A virtual shopping assistant is an application which provides a chatbot where users can post their queries regarding Apple products. This particular application is expected to provide customised recommendations depending on the device inventory, preferences and purchasing behaviour of the user.

However, in terms of privacy policy, it becomes clear what kind of information Apple uses to build this feature: account information, device identification information, carrier information, transcripts of chats and information regarding location (if allowed).

Most significantly, Apple's privacy disclosure states it will share information with "partners" to help "provide a conversational response". The language suggests Apple is not using solely its own AI models for the assistant.

Despite its investments in on-device AI and foundation models, the architecture of the shopping assistant seems to rely on third-party large language models. It is not clear whether Apple uses the services of established providers such as OpenAI or works with less-known AI labs.

In its statement, Apple claims that it "scrubs personal identifiers" from the transcripts before providing the information to partners. This implies that while personal identifiers are stripped away, the context of the conversation is kept intact, along with information about the device and the shopping behaviour.

The company added a virtual assistant to its Apple Support app, though that feature has only rolled out to some users. The Support Assistant has an "Ask" tab drawing from Apple documentation, a more controlled, narrowly focused tool than the broader shopping assistant being prepared for the store app.