Disable iOS 26 AI News Summaries Now

I turned off News AI-generated notification summaries the second iOS 26 finished installing. It’s a handy feature, but in the instance of breaking news, nuance is more important than haste. I’ve tried it out for weeks, and I’m still convinced you should turn it off.

What I Shut Down and Where You Can Find It

The setting resides in Settings, then Notifications, then Summarize Notifications. Apple allows you to select categories, like news and entertainment. (Flip those off to halt AI’s rewriting of the stuff that publishers deliver.) You can still maintain summaries for low-stakes apps like shopping promos if you desire less noise without risking misinformation.

Why AI Summaries Can’t Crack Breaking News Reliably

Summarization is one of the most difficult things to build systems for well. Real news alerts usually revolve around subtle language, qualifications, and emerging facts. The large language models suppress text by trying to predict likely wording — a tactic that can lead to three old-school mistakes: dropping crucial caveats, conflating entities, or flipping causation. Any would be enough to transform a hedging headline into an incorrect claim.

Apple even calls the feature beta and cautions in Settings that summaries may alter the meaning of the original notification, and might be incorrect. That caveat is more than rhinestones, though; it is a reminder that even with on-device intelligence and guardrails, meaning can get slippery when every word in your hand has to lift its weight.

Real-World Misfires Show the Stakes for Trust

News organizations have already raised skepticism about examples in which automated summaries garbled sensitive stories, reframing tentative reports as hard claims. One of these paraphrases, which misrepresented a crime report, was publicly rebuked by the BBC in January and led Apple to put a hold on the feature and come up with more strongly worded warnings before reintroducing it.

Concerns aren’t just anecdotal. The Reuters Institute has found that trust in news is still weak, with only about four out of 10 people saying they generally trust most news much of the time. Pew Research Center has detected widespread concern about mis- and disinformation. In that environment, anything that rewrites newsroom copy on the fly introduces another vector for confusion, even by well-intentioned readers.

Hidden Costs: Battery, Privacy, and Context

There are also some practical reasons to turn it off. Summarization has a cost and eats into battery life over a day of alerts. Perhaps more significantly, even when processing happens on-device, you are still allowing there to be an entire model inserted between you and the source of truth. That extra layer will strip away crucial context, such as “police say,” “reportedly,” or “under investigation.” For accuracy and legal purposes, those are there.

Push notifications, after all, are compressed headlines already; to compress them yet again is like putting a photocopy through a photocopier. Our signal deteriorates, and the parts you lose are often the very same parts that protect you from drawing a wrong conclusion.

How to Turn It Off in Seconds with Settings

It’s exactly how you quickly restore the source wording to read like this:

• Open Settings and click on Notifications.
• Tap Summarize Notifications.
• Turn off Summarize Notifications entirely, or keep it on and turn off the categories for News and Entertainment.
• If you’d like, check on per-app controls so ride-hailing, delivery, or banking alerts come through verbatim.

When It Can Help and How to Use It Safely

If you are a fan of keeping your lock screen clean, summaries will still be useful for noncritical apps. My compromise: to add summaries for shopping, travel deals, and group chats but never ever for news, finance, health, or safety alerts. And if you do keep it on for the headlines, apply these guardrails:

• Think of summaries as triggers, not statements of fact. Tap to read the original alert or article before you share it.
• Watch for hedging language. If caveats have been elided from the summary, suspect that the model has compressed away something critical.
• For breaking news, cross-check with multiple credible sources, especially items about crime, public health, or the markets.

Bottom Line: Turn Off AI News Summaries for Now

AI is good at math, search, and drafting emails. It’s awkward and still has the razor’s edge of breaking news. Until models are able to consistently retain nuance in a sentence or two, the smartest move may be to disable AI news summaries in iOS 26 and allow publishers’ words to reach you undistorted.