Yes, but they're loaner units primarily intended to contractually obligate security researchers to work for Apple. I trust a security researcher using an official Apple device about as well as a Trump-funded 2020 election audit.
Apple uses the technical protections on the phone to make it very difficult to actually even be in a position to do security research without also being NDA'd. There is no owner override like there is on, say, M1 Macs. Apple's position is that nobody but them loads OS code onto your iPhone. Not even you - and you can't practically do any research or auditing on things like the CSAM scanner without having the ability to poke around in the OS.
If Apple had an owner override on iOS-fused devices, then we could load our own kernels, call into the neuralhash framework, and so on to actually validate that the system does what it says. But that would also mean that Epic could sell Fortnite skins outside of the App Store, and we can't have that. So instead we need to gag and muzzle security researchers... which also makes them no longer independent auditors of the iOS security model.
Apple uses the technical protections on the phone to make it very difficult to actually even be in a position to do security research without also being NDA'd. There is no owner override like there is on, say, M1 Macs. Apple's position is that nobody but them loads OS code onto your iPhone. Not even you - and you can't practically do any research or auditing on things like the CSAM scanner without having the ability to poke around in the OS.
If Apple had an owner override on iOS-fused devices, then we could load our own kernels, call into the neuralhash framework, and so on to actually validate that the system does what it says. But that would also mean that Epic could sell Fortnite skins outside of the App Store, and we can't have that. So instead we need to gag and muzzle security researchers... which also makes them no longer independent auditors of the iOS security model.