Apple is adding AI-powered photo editing tools to iPhones later this year, but taking a more cautious approach than rivals by restricting what the AI can generate and requiring manual control over each edit.

What happened: Apple announced two new generative AI features for its Photos app in iOS 27—Extend (which expands the space around a photo by 25 percent) and Spatial Reframe (which changes the perspective of an image)—alongside improvements to its existing Clean Up tool. The company will also add an invisible watermark using Google DeepMind's SynthID technology to flag AI-edited images, and will integrate Siri into the Camera app.

Why it matters: Unlike Google and Samsung, which let users drastically alter photos by erasing people or adding objects freely, Apple is deliberately restricting these tools to solve specific compositional problems—like removing an unwanted background object or reframing a subject. Jon McCormack, Apple's iPhone camera chief, emphasizes the company believes "a photograph is of something that actually happened" and wants to preserve "the sanctity of that moment," rather than enable broad photo manipulation. Users will need an iCloud subscription to use these features multiple times a day.

What to watch: The features arrive on iPhones later this year. Notably, Apple's AI cannot alter the main subject's face with Clean Up, Extend only works once per image, and the company trained its models to avoid generating unnecessary details—though in practice, when expanding a scene with people, the tool may still add background figures that weren't in the original photo to match the aesthetic.