Apple Intelligence is now a little easier to get outside the U.S.
Apple Intelligence is a little easier to try out if you're not in the U.S. Unfortunately, users in the European Union and China are still fully excluded.
As noticed by 9to5Mac, the latest developer beta of iOS (iOS 18.1 Beta 3) no longer requires the user to set the device region to the U.S. The only thing that is required is for the user to set device language and Siri language to the U.S. English language.
This does not mean that AI features are available in languages other than U.S. English; they're not. It's just a little easier for users outside of the U.S. to test the new features out, without having to set device region to the U.S. and thus change their clock, calendar, and other settings.
Apple's own release notes for iOS 18.1 Beta 3 reflect this. "To try the Apple Intelligence beta, join the waitlist in Settings and you will be notified as soon as it is ready for your device. Both device language and Siri language must be set to U.S. English," the notes say.
Being in Europe, I was excited about this change. Unfortunately, the release notes also state that "Apple Intelligence is not currently available in the EU or China." I've upgraded to the latest developer beta and tested this out; sure enough, Apple Intelligence is still unavailable to me.
This is hardly surprising given Europe's recently introduced rules for artificial intelligence, which prompted Apple to delay AI features in the EU.
There is a way to override this and test Apple Intelligence features in Europe, but it requires the user to set the device region to U.S. (in addition to the settings mentioned above). The real dealbreaker is that you also must set your Apple ID country to the U.S., and to do that, you need to go through a number of (typically painfully annoying) steps which include canceling subscriptions that block a country/region change and wait for subscriptions to expire, and re-download all your apps, music, movies, and TV shows. And even if you do all that, it still might not work unless you use a VPN (and even then you could get mixed results). In other words, for the vast majority of users, it's not worth trying.