On-Device Processing and Privacy

A crucial part of Apple’s push into AI is making the experience far more personal than most other AI bots and systems can accomplish. As Apple’s Craig Federighi said, many AI systems know about the world’s information but don’t know much about you. That’s probably a good thing, considering the potential for personal data to be misused. Still, Apple’s goal is to allow Apple Intelligence to leverage as much information about you as it can by doing it with the utmost privacy and security.

As with nearly every other machine learning feature Apple has introduced in the past decade, Apple Intelligence will run its algorithms on-device as much as possible. That means it can pull in data from photos, email messages, iMessage conversations, and just about anything else on your device without any fear of that data leaking out because it never leaves your device.

Of course, even with Apple’s newest and most powerful M4 chip, some things will be beyond the ability of Apple silicon to handle. For those requests, Apple has built “Private Cloud Compute,” a system that securely and temporarily uploads only the information specifically needed to process the request to servers entirely managed and controlled by Apple and independently verified by third-party auditors.