The United States said the United Kingdom will end its effort to access U.S. Apple users’ encrypted data.
Tulsi Gabbard, U.S. director of national intelligence, said in a post on social platform X Monday (Aug. 18) that she, President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance had spent the last few months working with the U.K. to hammer out a deal.
Over the past few months, I’ve been working closely with our partners in the UK, alongside @POTUS and @VP, to ensure Americans’ private data remains private and our Constitutional rights and civil liberties are protected.
As a result, the UK has agreed to drop its mandate for…
— DNI Tulsi Gabbard (@DNIGabbard) August 19, 2025
“As a result, the U.K. has agreed to drop its mandate for Apple to provide a ‘back door’ that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens and encroached on our civil liberties,” Gabbard said.
The order was issued in January under the U.K. Investigatory Powers Act and has been protested by Apple, the Financial Times (FT) reported.
The tech giant responded by withdrawing the online backup service at the center of the order, iCloud Advanced Data Protection, from the U.K., while mounting a legal challenge.
“It’s an unprecedented overreach by the government and, if enacted, the U.K. could attempt to secretly veto new user protections globally, preventing us from ever offering them to customers,” Apple said last year when amendments to the act were first proposed.
The company has clashed with other countries over this issue as well. In 2015, the U.S. government used a third party to look into the user data of the perpetrator of a high-profile shooting after Apple denied access.
In June, Meta-owned messaging platform WhatsApp joined a legal challenge against the order, lending its support to two cases, one brought by Apple and another filed by a pair of human rights campaign groups. WhatsApp argued that the government’s order would harm the encryption technology employed by messaging apps and digital storage services.
While the U.K. has agreed to withdraw the order, no formal action has been taken, the FT reported. A trio of U.K. officials said the dispute with the Trump administration is now resolved after government representatives met senior U.S. officials, including Vance, in recent weeks.
One said the issue was “settled,” while another described the U.K. as having “caved” to U.S. pressure, per the report. The third said, “We can’t and we won’t” make Apple break its encryption.