The government of the UK has agreed to stop demanding Apple provide backdoor access to user data, according to the U.S. Director of Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.

The UK has, for quite some time, demanded that Apple somehow breaks its end-to-end encryption and provide some form of backdoor. After a law update in 2024 and a secretive legal battle, the UK has apparently given up.

In a post to X on Tuesday, U.S. spy chief Tulsi Gabbard claimed to have worked with partners in the UK, as well as President Donald Trump and VP J.D. Vance, on the UK's backdoor mandate. After months of work, Gabbard says that the UK has dropped the mandate affecting Apple.

Gabbard adds that the UK's attempt to get access to Apple's customer data could have potentially given access to the data of American citizens and "encroached on our civil liberties."

At the time of publication, Gabbard is the only official source of the UK policy change.

Neither the U.S. nor UK governments have made any formal announcement about the matter, the BBC has observed. Given the secretive way the UK has tried to handle the matter, there may not even be any confirmation on that side of the Atlantic.

How this all started

In 2024, the UK revamped its UK Investigatory Powers Act of 2016 to give itself the authority to legally — and secretly — compel Apple to break the end-to-end encryption that its security and privacy depends on. Despite bipartisan protests from the US, the UK issued the order and Apple could not continue to operate its end-to-end encryption without breaking the law.

Instead of allowing the UK backdoor access to encrypted data, however, Apple announced that it switched off end-to-end encryption in the UK. This technically complies with the law, but means Apple did not create a backdoor that the UK or other bad actors could use.

Apple can no longer offer Advanced Data Protection (ADP) in the United Kingdom to new users and current UK users will eventually need to disable this security feature. ADP protects iCloud data with end-to-end encryption, which means the data can only be decrypted by the user who owns it, and only on their trusted devices.

We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP will not be available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy. Enhancing the security of cloud storage with end-to-end encryption is more urgent than ever before.

Apple remains committed to offering our users the highest level of security for their personal data and are hopeful that we will be able to do so in the future in the United Kingdom. As we have said many times before, we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services and we never will.

What the UK wanted

Ostensibly, the UK wanted Apple to create a backdoor into its encryption, not just turn off end-to-end encryption, so that government officials could read any data they deemed necessary in criminal investigations. What the UK asked for was worldwide access, which is part of what enraged the US.

Arguably what the UK really wanted was for Apple to do what it did and remove certain protections from the UK. If so, it got what it wanted, but there are ramifications.

With UK data such as messaging less protected than anywhere else in the world, it's harder for anywhere else in the world to deal with the UK. In February 2025, US Intelligence Services said that they were considering a reduction or a full stop on sharing data with the UK.

It's not yet clear if Apple will turn end-to-end encryption back on. It seems likely that it will not.