Apple is making data privacy a core component of its new AI platform.

Apple Intelligence, which debuted at today's WWDC, pulls data from across your device to perform personal actions. It can make suggestions using your most intimate data, such as photos, emails, calendar events, and texts.

Sound creepy? Apple hopes the utility makes up for it. In the presentation, an Apple exec gave the example of someone who receives an email to change a meeting time, but they first want to check if it interferes with picking up their child from a playdate. Apple Intelligence will know who their child is, where and when the playdate is, and look at traffic patterns to see if the timing conflicts. Then, it surfaces a suggested answer to the email.

Apple Intelligence requests first run through the Apple silicon chips in an iPhone, iPad, or Mac instead of sending the data to faraway servers, which can "store your data and use it in ways you did not intend,” Apple says. Those servers typically have the liberty to process data as they see fit, and you're "unable to verify" how it's used and how long it's stored. With the on-device approach, that data is processed, well, on your device. No server transfers.

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(Credit: Apple/PCMag)

Apple Intelligence still relies on servers for the most complex computations. For each request, the system first determines whether the on-device chip can process it. If not, it sends the request to what Apple's calling Private Cloud Compute.

"With Private Cloud Compute, Apple Intelligence can flex and scale its computational capacity and draw on larger, server-based models for more complex requests," Apple says. "These models run on servers powered by Apple silicon, providing a foundation that allows Apple to ensure that data is never retained or exposed."

Apple says "independent experts can inspect the code that runs on these servers to verify the privacy promise."

Apple Intelligence is coming to iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia as a beta in US English this fall on the iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and iPad and Mac with M1 and later.