Apple courts developers with privacy and context in AI comeback bid

At its 2026 Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple offered a vision of how to integrate AI with its products that stands out for its sobriety, responsibility, and plausibility. 

In contrast to the job-killing, security-breaking, human-replacing hype promulgated by the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI, company execs dialed down their usual superlative-laden effusiveness to convey how AI tools can actually help software developers, as well as those using Apple products.

Capabilities like Safari's Notify Me – website change notification – and the browser's low-code extension creation service called Describe an Extension look like solid uses for machine learning technology.

Part of Cupertino's more modest marketing may be attributable to the crow that the company has eaten as a result of underperforming AI. But it also fits with the lack of sizzle in the company's three areas of focus: platform improvements, child safety enhancements, and Apple Intelligence.

Platform improvements like 30 percent faster app launches, Photos loading that occurs 70 percent faster, and a more efficient CPU Scheduler aren't exactly the sorts of features that marketing departments know what to do with, even if they deliver noticeable user experience improvements. And Child Safety, while welcomed by some and politically expedient at this moment in time, is fundamentally about limiting the use of Apple products rather than expanding it.

That leaves Apple Intelligence, which has underdelivered since its introduction in 2024.

"Rebuilt from the ground up, Apple is trying to make AI feel native, useful, and invisible across the devices people already use every day," said Francisco Jeronimo, IDC VP of client devices, in an email to The Register.

"This matters because the winning AI experience for consumers will not be the loudest or most technically complex. It will be the one that understands context, respects privacy, works reliably across apps, and reduces friction without forcing users to change behaviour."

Much of the developer keynote focused on improvements to Siri, now rebranded Siri AI, which will reach the general public when the v27 of Apple's various platforms drop this fall. Apple developers can now access better versions of these releases.

But beyond the claim that Siri is now fit for purpose, the presenting Apple execs managed to highlight the company's substantive advantages in terms of privacy, integration, and cost. And they made a good pitch for developing AI applications on Apple platforms, and for using the Swift programming language to do so.

"Today, many AI providers talk about privacy, but by default, most of them retain your personal interactions, leaving the onus on you to defend your privacy," explained Craig Federighi, Apple's SVP of software engineering. "Like using temporary chats, deleting conversations, or even turning off entire features. At Apple, we believe privacy in AI is non-negotiable."

While Apple has overpromised on privacy in the past – describing privacy as a human right and then treating it as a government-granted perk – the company's AI privacy story, centered around Private Cloud Compute, has been compelling enough to prompt Google to copy it.

Anyone developing applications with AI tools should be thinking about data security and data privacy. Cloud-based AI models can easily capture sensitive data. Apple is offering developers the ability to use its Foundation Models framework – based on Google's Gemini model family and newly multimodal – on-device or in Private Cloud Compute, while also allowing integration with cloud-based model providers and custom models where necessary.

What's more, it is doing so in a way that respects the reality of software development – not all developers can risk wiring their app to a costly AI API (e.g. Claude or Codex) that might produce AI bills above and beyond app revenue. 

So Apple is making the Foundation Model framework available on Private Cloud Compute with no cloud API cost for devs who have yet to make it big.

"Developers with fewer than two million first time App Store downloads will be able to use Apple Foundation Models running in Private Cloud Compute with no cloud API costs," said  Joshua Shaffer, senior director of software at Apple, during Apple's Platforms State of the Union presentation. "It's access to frontier level intelligence with unparalleled privacy protections. Because getting started, exploring ideas shouldn't be held back by infrastructure costs."

Or by infrastructure barriers. One of Apple's advantages is its control of both hardware and software. And the company is making use of its technology stack to solve the context problem. AI models perform better when they have access to contextual information. Because that information is commonly siloed by application boundaries, permissions, and other sorts of controls, developers may not be able to provide AI services with enough useful information.

Apple has announced both enhancements to existing technologies and new ones to help make contextual information more accessible to AI models and to improve AI-oriented development. 

For example, Spotlight, Apple's on-device search indexing service, has been rewritten to suck less – it has a long history of spotty service, requiring users to remove their storage device and re-add it to trigger re-indexing. What's more, Spotlight has been integrated with Siri in hopes that it will make the service more effective at finding files and surfacing relevant data in apps to inform AI queries.

Apple's Xcode 27 sports various improvements, though the most notable change arrived in February, when Xcode 26.3 added support for Anthropic's Claude Agent and OpenAI's Codex. That list has now been expanded to include Google's Gemini and agent customization. The IDE's integration with AI coding agents is a meaningful improvement because Xcode can be rather daunting and complicated for those who aren't veteran Apple platform developers. Being able to ask an AI agent to identify some small configuration stumbling block is a welcome change.

The App Intents framework has been extended to help developers make better use of Siri AI capabilities through personal context understanding, access to app actions, and onscreen activities.

There's also a new Core AI framework, "a modern, memory-safe Swift API that lets you load, specialize, and run AI models entirely on-device, keeping user data private and your apps responsive, with zero server dependencies and zero token costs," as Apple puts it.

If frontier model leaders like Anthropic and OpenAI continue to raise prices, Apple's local model story is likely to look more and more compelling. ®