People walk past an Apple store at the Americana at Brand shopping center on December 26, 2023 in Glendale, California.

Apple is expected to unveil its new iPhone lineup today that is designed for artificial intelligence, but it is also raising questions about privacy and data for some users.

Apple Intelligence — the collective brand name for all of Apple’s proprietary AI tools — is intended to be more of a personal assistant than anything else. It takes in specific information about your relationships and contacts, messages and emails you’ve sent, events you’ve attended, meetings in your calendar, and other highly individualized bits of data about your life.

But while Apple Intelligence will have access to a wide range of your personal data, it won’t have what the company’s executives call “world intelligence”: more general information about history, current events and other things less directly tied to you.

That’s where ChatGPT comes in. Users can have Siri forward questions and prompts to ChatGPT (on an opt-in basis) or have ChatGPT help them write documents in Apple apps.

What about your data: Because Apple Intelligence and ChatGPT are used for largely different purposes, the amount and type of information users send to each AI can also differ. ChatGPT doesn’t necessarily or automatically have access to your highly personal data, though you can opt to share some of that data and more with OpenAI if you decide to use ChatGPT through Apple. During a demo in June, Apple demonstrated that Siri would ask the user for permission to send a prompt to ChatGPT before doing so.

While Apple users will need to send their personal information and AI queries to OpenAI if they want to use ChatGPT, Apple has said that most of the time, Apple Intelligence won’t send any user data anywhere. As much as possible, Apple will try to process AI prompts directly on your device using smaller AI models.

This is similar to how Apple already handles FaceID and other sensitive data: the idea is that processing data directly on the device limits risk exposure. Your data can’t be intercepted or hacked from a central server if it never goes anywhere.