Apple Quietly Built a Toll Road for AI Inside iMessage — and Poke Just Became the First to Pay It (opens in new tab)

Apple has approved Poke as the first third-party AI agent on its Messages for Business platform, letting iPhone users text an AI assistant directly in iMessage — and collecting a per-user fee from the startup for the privilege. The move reveals less about Poke's features than about Apple's emerging monetization architecture for AI, one that could reshape how a billion people encounter artificial intelligence on their phones.