After Apple abruptly decided that it will not introduce its Apple Intelligence AI features in the EU this year, the company has now faced accusations that it is aware that its latest product violates anti-competitive rules.

Margrethe Vestager, the Executive Vice President for A Europe Fit for the Digital Age, essentially the EU’s commissioner for competition, indicated in remarks last week that Apple’s decision is tantamount to an admission of wrongdoing.

“Apple has said that they will not launch their new AI-enabled features in the IRS environment, and they say that they will not do that because of the obligations that they have in Europe. And the obligation that they have in Europe is to be open for competition — that is the short version of the DMA [Digital Markets Act]. And I find that very interesting that they say ‘We will now deploy AI where we’re not obliged to enable competition’ — I think that is the most sort of stunning open declaration that they know 100 per cent that this is another way of disabling competition where they have a stronghold already,” remarked Vestager during a Q&A session at Forum Europa, reported GSM Arena.

Apple has tried to reshape the narrative around its Apple Intelligence features that were unveiled at the WWDC earlier this year. Rather than addressing whether those features were anticompetitive, it instead noted that there were issues around the ‘interoperability’ of those features in the EU.

“We are concerned that the interoperability requirements of the DMA could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security,” Apple said in a statement.

Apple’s decision to halt the rollout in the EU will mean consumers in all 27 of the bloc’s nations, including the likes of France, Germany, Spain and Italy, won’t have access to the company’s new AI technologies.

Last week, in a separate investigation that it carried out, the EU presented its preliminary findings to Apple wherein, as ChannelNews reported, the EC found that Apple broke so-called anti-steering rules.

At the time of declaring those preliminary findings, the EU indicated that it had opened yet another investigation into Apple wherein the EC took issue with new fees Apple is charging developers “to access some of the new features enabled by the DMA,” such as the ability to offer a third-party app marketplace as well as app downloads through other means, such as the web.