His comments came just minutes after a majority of shareholders rejected a proposal calling on the tech giant to consider ending its diversity policies, such as the use of race and sex in hiring decisions.

Apple had urged shareholders to vote against the measure, which the company had argued was “inappropriately” trying “to micromanage” its business.

The scrutiny of the firm comes as US President Donald Trump has called for an end to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes in the government and private sector, including at Apple.

In a social media post the day after the meeting, Trump ramped up the pressure on the company.

“Apple should get rid of DEI rules, not just make adjustments to them,” he wrote in a all-capital-letters post. “DEI was a hoax that has been very bad for our country. DEI is gone!!!”

Trump’s DEI orders have run into legal roadblocks, but many companies in the US, including big names such as Meta, Amazon and Goldman Sachs, have already ended or rolled back their own policies, citing legal risks.

Apple’s decision to fight the shareholder proposal had bucked that tide.

Shareholder measures opposed by companies rarely succeed, so the outcome of Tuesday’s vote was expected.

It marked the second high-profile defeat of shareholder proposal targeting DEI, after a similar rejection at retailer Costco.

However, despite the vote, Mr Cook on Tuesday acknowledged that the firm may have to alter some of its practices.

“As the legal landscape around this issue evolves, we may need to make some changes to comply, but our north star of dignity and respect for everyone and our work to that end will never waver,” Mr Cook said during a question-and-answer session at the company’s annual shareholder meeting.

He noted that Apple did not use “quotas” for hiring – a practice that has come in for some of the fiercest criticism – while saying the firm’s strength came from a culture where “people with diverse backgrounds and perspectives come together”.

“We’ll continue to work together to create a culture of belonging where everyone can do their best work,” he added, saying the company would remain “committed to the values that have always made us who we are”.

The proposal targeting Apple’s DEI policies was backed by the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative think tank, which had also put forward the proposal at Costco.

It argued that the existence of Apple’s diversity and inclusion programmes exposed the firm to “litigation, reputational and financial risks”, pointing to the wider corporate retreat andnoting that recent lawsuits have made it easier for workers to sue over discrimination.

Stefan Padfield of the organisation’s Free Enterprise Project, who presented the proposal at Tuesday’s meeting, said the risks to Apple had increased after the Trump administration recently ordered staff to investigate DEI in the private sector.

“The vibe shift is clear,” he said. “DEI is out and merit is in.”

Apple’s decision to push back against the shareholder proposal, while simultaneously opening the door to changing its policy is an effort to satisfy both sides of the fight, said Angela Jackson, a senior advisor to the Project on Workforce at Harvard University and author of the forthcoming book, The Win-Win Workplace.

But she warned that it left Apple “playing defence”. She said she wanted to see the company lead by making a more robust business case for the programmes.

“They’ve made the right moves. The one step they could go further… is to really say, ‘Yes it’s our values, we believe it’s the right thing to do, but it’s also an economic imperative.”

The fight over DEI in the US has raised questions about whether such policies in other countries will face similar challenges.

Catherine Howarth, chief executive of the responsible investment charity ShareAction, said she thought that Apple – a global, consumer-facing firm – had made the bet that the benefits of pushing back against the shareholder proposal outweighed the risks.

“It’s not popular with consumers and it’s not popular with employees to abandon what were supposedly your principles in this area until very recently,” she said.

“They think it would go down very badly – and it would – with their global consumer base.”

Shareholders also rejected proposals that would have required Apple to report about its AI privacy practices, charitable giving and policies to combat child sex abuse.

They backed the board members supported by the company, as well as its executive compensation, including a pay package for Mr Cook worth more than $74m.

The request came after President Donald Trump banned diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices and programmes throughout the government.

Emails seen by the BBC directed workers to “report all facts and circumstances” to a new government email address within 10 days.

Some employees interpreted it as a demand to sell out their colleagues to the White House.

“We’re really freaked out and overwhelmed,” said one employee at the Department Health and Human Services (HHS).

The  Office of Personnel Management, which manages the federal workforce, issued guidance requiring agency heads to send a notice to their staff by 17:00 eastern time on Wednesday. It included an email template that many federal staffers ultimately received that night.

Some employees, like those at the Treasury Department, got slightly different versions of the email.

The Treasury Department email excluded the warning about “adverse consequences” for not reporting DEI initiatives, according to a copy shared with the BBC.

In one of his first actions as president, Trump signed two executive orders ending “diversity, equity, and inclusion” or “DEI” programmes within the federal government and announced any employees working in those roles would immediately be placed on paid administrative leave.

Such programmes are designed to increase minority participation in the workforce and educate employees about discrimination.

But critics of DEI, like Trump, argue that the practice itself is discriminatory because it takes race, gender, sexual identity or other characteristics into consideration.

Trump and his allies attacked the practice frequently during the campaign.

In a speech Thursday at the World Economic Conference in Davos, Switzerland, Trump declared he was making America a “merit-based country”.

Critics of DEI have praised Trump’s decision.

“President Trump’s executive orders rescinding affirmative action and banning DEI programs are a major milestone in American civil rights progress and a critical step towards building a colour-blind society,” Yukong Mike Zhao, president of the Asian American Coalition for Education, said in a statement.

The group had supported a successful effort at the US Supreme Court to overturn affirmative action programmes at US universities.

But current federal employees, who spoke to the BBC on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation, said that the email they received felt more like an attempt to intimidate staff than to make the government more fair.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

President Trump has signed a torrent of executive orders since he took office, including a hiring freeze in the federal government, an order for workers to return to the office and an attempt to reclassify thousands of government employees in order to make them easier to fire.

The HHS employee who spoke to the BBC criticised the government’s DEI practices, believing that while it was important to build a diverse staff and create opportunities in health and medical fields, “identity politics have played into how we function normally and that’s not beneficial to the workforce”.

“But that doesn’t mean I want my colleagues to get fired,” the employee added.

He described the impact the email and the DEI orders had on his agency as “very calculated chaos”.

The employee’s division had been thrown into confusion, he said, with questions about hiring practices going forward, as well as what programmes and directives were allowed to continue, given Trump’s broad definition of DEI.

A second HHS employee said that hiring and research grants had been frozen and the entire department staff was waiting to see what they could do next.

The HHS, and one of its subsidiary agencies, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), issue millions of dollars in federal grants to universities and researchers across the globe to advance scientific research.

Agency employees feared that the DEI order could have an impact outside the government as well. One questioned if grants that allowed laboratories to create more opportunities for hiring minority scientists and medical professionals would now get the axe.

An employee who worked at the Food and Drug Administration told the BBC that she had not received the email, but all DEI-related activities had been paused.

“We have been told by seniors to keep doing our jobs,” she said. “But there is a sense of fear about how it’s going to have an impact on our work in general.”