Apple is withdrawing a feature that uses artificial intelligence to produce news summaries after it repeatedly sent headlines with errors, drawing the ire of news organizations such as the BBC and the Washington Post.

The feature, which was introduced in the fall, generated headlines that were sometimes misleading or outright false. Apple announced on Thursday that it will pause the software while the company works on improvements.

CBC News has contacted an Apple spokesperson for more information.

One of the more outrageous headlines falsely claimed that Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had shot himself. This was wrongly attributed to the BBC, who said this in December contacted Apple with its problems.

Other fake headlines said US Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth was “fired”, Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio was “confirmed” and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “arrested”. Neither was true.

Reporters Without Borders, a non-profit organization that advocates for freedom of information, sent a statement last month calling on Apple to pull the feature, saying it was “deeply concerned about the risks new artificial intelligence tools pose to the media.”

Referring to the headline Mangione incident, the organization said that “this accident highlights the inability of AI systems to systematically publish quality information, even when based on journalistic sources.”