The suggestion emerged during Apple’s November 2 earnings call, when Chief Financial Officer Kevan Parekh described several ways AI could contribute to future revenue. Apple could benefit when customers upgrade their hardware, he said, while also finding opportunities through third-party applications, partnerships and its own products. The comments were made during a discussion of the company’s fiscal fourth-quarter results, which Apple reported in its official results release.
Parekh did not name a specific AI company, application or commercial agreement. He also did not say that Apple is preparing a separate App Store category for AI agents. Still, the wording matters because it places third-party AI alongside Apple’s hardware and software as a possible source of growth.
The distinction is important. A conventional application is something a user opens and operates. An AI agent may be designed to act continuously or semi-autonomously, carrying out tasks, making recommendations or interacting with other software on the user’s behalf. That could turn an App Store purchase into a longer relationship involving subscriptions, usage fees or transactions made inside an agent.
TechCrunch reported that Parekh did not explain what Apple’s third-party AI opportunity would involve. The report also cited Reuters’ account of investor speculation that Apple might distribute third-party AI agents through the App Store and take a share of the revenue they generate.
That possibility would extend a model Apple already understands. The company operates a large software marketplace and has historically collected a percentage of transactions made through it. An AI agent marketplace could apply that logic to services that do not simply sell access to a piece of software. Instead, they could help users shop, arrange services, manage information or complete other activities, with the agent potentially becoming the interface through which money changes hands.
For Apple, the timing is significant. Its services business remains a major part of the company’s growth story, but the traditional App Store model is under pressure. Regulatory changes and court rulings have required Apple to permit alternative payment routes in some markets, challenging its control over transactions and the commission revenue attached to them.
The company is also dealing with pressure from weaker mobile gaming performance and licensing issues. Apple expects services growth of approximately 8% to 9% in the December quarter, according to Parekh’s remarks on the official Apple earnings call. The company has pointed to record paid subscriptions and double-digit growth for third-party apps, but those gains do not remove the need to find new areas of expansion.
AI agents could offer Apple several possible paths. The company could classify them as ordinary applications and apply existing App Store rules. It could create a special framework for agents that act on behalf of users or initiate transactions. Apple could bundle selected services with Apple Intelligence, or it could negotiate partnerships with model providers and place their products more prominently across its devices.
Each approach would create practical and political problems.
Commission rates would be one immediate question. An agent that charges a monthly subscription might fit familiar App Store rules. An agent that earns money by completing purchases or arranging services would be harder to categorize. Apple would need to decide whether its fee applies to the agent’s subscription, the transactions it helps complete, or both.
User data would create another point of tension. Agents are valuable partly because they can understand a user’s preferences and act across several services. That raises questions about what information Apple, the agent provider and outside businesses can access. It also raises the possibility that default placement on an iPhone could give some providers a powerful advantage over others.
The regulatory risks could therefore grow alongside the business opportunity. Apple is already defending the boundaries of its marketplace in an environment where lawmakers and courts are questioning how much control a platform should have over payments and distribution. A marketplace for autonomous digital services could invite closer examination of ranking, access, privacy and competition.
There is some support for Apple’s broader AI strategy, but no opposing view was identified in the supplied sources. AP reported that eMarketer analyst Jacob Bourne viewed Apple’s cautious AI infrastructure spending as a way to preserve cash flow, while partnerships such as those with Alphabet could strengthen Apple’s capabilities without exposing it to the same financial risk faced by rivals.
For now, Apple has offered a direction rather than a product. The company is testing whether AI can support hardware sales, strengthen its own services and create new commercial relationships across the App Store. If agents become a major way people interact with digital services, Apple will have to decide whether it wants merely to host them or to build the marketplace through which they operate.
Daniel Reyes is not a person. No notebook, no deadlines, no face behind the name — just a byline this newsroom publishes under. Here is the production line underneath it, because a name beside a portrait reads like a journalist, and this one is not one.
The models. Writing: gpt-5.6-luna and qwen3-max. Out on the live web: gpt-5.6-luna and gpt-5.6-terra. Pictures: gpt-image-1 and gpt-image-1-mini. Swap one in the newsroom and this line swaps with it — it is read off the machines, not typed here.
How a story is made
- Research. The searching model reads around the story, pointed at primary sources — the filing, the post, the repository — rather than at somebody else's write-up of them.
- Writing. The writing model drafts it against what was found, at Daniel Reyes's usual length and in Daniel Reyes's usual register.
- The loop. A reviewer reads the draft and sends it back with notes. Then reads it again. A piece can go round several times before it leaves the building.
- Enrichment. A quotation has to appear word for word on the page it is taken from. A chart may only use figures that appear in the source it cites. Whatever fails is dropped, and the reason is kept.
- Fact check. A last pass hunts for claims the article makes and its sources do not.
- A human stop. Sensitive subjects are held for a person to read before publication, and a person can kill any of it at any point.
If that sounds less like a newsroom and more like a factory: quite. It is called Press Factory.
This article was generated using AI and published automatically without human pre-publication review.
How this article was made
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