This guide covers three ways to disable Apple Intelligence notification summaries on your iPhone: a global off switch that stops them across every app, a category-level setting that targets news apps specifically, and how to turn off AI notification summaries on iPhone before you've ever opted in. All three paths run through Settings > Notifications > Summarize Notifications.
Who this applies to: Apple Intelligence notification summaries only run on iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPhone 16 models, and newer Apple Intelligence-compatible iPhones running iOS 18.1 or later. If your device isn't on that list, these settings won't appear, and you don't need this guide.
Why the feature is back and why Apple is warning you about it
Apple brought iOS 26 notification summaries back to Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhones when it released iOS 26 in September 2025, after disabling them in early 2025. The feature had been pulled after the BBC pointed out in December 2024 that it was distorting the organization's push notifications and displaying inaccurate information.
What's different about the iOS 26 version isn't that Apple has fixed the underlying accuracy problem. It's just the settings now say so out loud. When you tap to enable the News & Entertainment category, a red-outlined warning appears: "Summarization may change the meaning of the original headline. Verify information." A second notice at the bottom of the screen reads: "This is a beta feature. Summaries may contain errors." Apple's settings warn that summaries may be inaccurate. That's the disclosure doing the work that accuracy improvements haven't.
The feature requires deliberate opt-in. You have to enable AI summaries on your device. If you've never responded to the setup prompt and haven't adjusted these settings, check Settings > Notifications > Summarize Notifications to see whether they're active.
The fastest path: turn off all notification summaries on iPhone
If you want AI summaries gone entirely across every app category, this is the direct route.
Open the Settings app on your iPhone.
Tap Notifications.
Tap Summarize Notifications.
Toggle Summarize Notifications off.
Every notification you receive from this point forward arrives in the sending app's original wording, unmodified. News alerts, message threads, social notifications, all of it.
What changes on screen: The italic text that flags summarized notifications disappears from your lock screen and notification center. No AI-rewritten text, no question of whether the summary matches what was actually sent. Summarized notifications are always displayed in italics when active, so if you're unsure whether a notification you're reading has been rewritten, that's the tell. You can also tap any italicized notification to expand it and view the full original text.
Before you re-enable: If you turn summaries off and later decide to turn them back on, iOS doesn't retain your previous category selections. You'll need to reselect which app categories you want summarized from scratch. Worth knowing if you're toggling this off as a test rather than a permanent change.
How to turn off news app notification summaries on iPhone
If AI summaries are genuinely useful for condensing group chats or high-volume social feeds, but you want news alerts delivered as written, iOS 26 lets you control this by app category rather than all or nothing.
Follow steps 1 through 3 above to reach the Summarize Notifications screen, then:
Keep Summarize Notifications toggled on.
You'll see three category toggles: News & Entertainment, Communication & Social, and All Other Apps.
Leave News & Entertainment toggled off. Enable or disable the remaining categories based on your preference.
Tap Summarize Selected Notifications at the bottom to confirm. If you've selected all categories, that button will read Summarize All Notifications instead.
Why News & Entertainment is the one to watch: It's the only category that triggers a red-outlined accuracy warning when you tap to enable it. Communication & Social and All Other Apps carry no equivalent notice. Apple's own UI draws that line, and it's worth taking seriously. A summarized message thread saying a meeting got rescheduled is low-stakes if the AI gets it slightly wrong. A summarized breaking news alert isn't.
What this looks like in practice: News alerts arrive as the publisher wrote them. Any categories you've left enabled continue generating summaries, displayed in italics so you can identify them at a glance. The tradeoff is deliberate: convenience where the accuracy stakes are recoverable, original text where they're not.
Per-app controls: Beyond the three-category system, individual app-level summary toggles become available once Summarize Notifications is enabled. Go to Settings > Notifications, tap a specific app, and look for summary options within that app's notification settings. This is useful if you want to keep News & Entertainment summaries broadly active but carve out a specific outlet, say a wire service whose alerts you rely on for breaking news, from being rewritten. The category toggle is the blunt instrument; per-app controls are the scalpel.
How to decline during the initial setup prompt
If iOS 26 hasn't prompted you to configure notification summaries yet, you may see an onboarding screen the first time the feature is surfaced. You're not required to enable anything.
When you see this screen, you have two options: Choose Notifications to Summarize or Not Now.
To skip it entirely: Tap Not Now. The screen closes, and summaries are not enabled on your device. Nothing else to do.
If you tap "Choose Notifications to Summarize" by accident: You'll land on the three-category screen described above. Leave all categories unselected and tap Do Not Summarize Notifications at the bottom. Summaries will not activate for any category.
Declining here is the cleanest outcome. The feature stays off, and there's no configuration to revisit later. The same Settings path is available any time if you change your mind.
Which option fits your situation
The decision comes down to how much you rely on notification text being accurate, and for which apps.
Turn off all summaries if accuracy matters across the board and you'd rather not have AI paraphrasing anything before it reaches you. No categories to manage, no risk of a high-stakes alert arriving with a different meaning than what was sent. The global toggle is the lowest-friction option and eliminates the accuracy variable entirely.
Turn off News & Entertainment only if you find AI summaries genuinely useful for condensing group chats or high-volume social apps, but want news alerts untouched. The selective approach gets you the convenience benefit where an error is recoverable, and the original text where it isn't. That's a reasonable place to land.
Decline at setup if you haven't opted in yet. No feature enabled means nothing to manage later.
The context behind all three paths: Apple disabled these summaries after the BBC's December 2024 complaint, then reintroduced them in iOS 26 with in-settings warnings rather than published accuracy improvements. Opting out of news summaries specifically, or globally, is a calibrated response to that disclosure. Apple's own warning text makes the case.
After you've made the change
The core setting lives at Settings > Notifications > Summarize Notifications. Whatever path you took, that's where to go if you want to revisit the configuration. Re-enabling follows the same steps and takes under a minute, but iOS won't remember your earlier category choices, so plan to reselect them.
One detail worth carrying forward: summarized notifications are always displayed in italics on your lock screen and in notification center. If summaries turn up again after a software update or an accidental settings change, the italic formatting is the signal. Tap any italicized notification to expand it and read the full original text from the sender.
For most people, the selective approach — News & Entertainment off, other categories optional — strikes the right balance between utility and accuracy risk. For anyone who wants to stop second-guessing which notifications have been rewritten, the global toggle is four taps and done.
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