Apple working on MCP support on Mac, iPhone, and iPad – 9to5Mac

With today’s rollout of developer betas for iOS 26.1, iPadOS 26.1, and macOS Tahoe 26.1, Apple began to lay the groundwork for adopting Anthropic’s protocol for agentic AI. Here’s what this means.

What’s MCP again?

MCP, or Model Context Protocol, was proposed last November by Anthropic, and quickly became the industry’s standard interface between AI systems and traditional platforms. In a nutshell, it wants to be the AI equivalent of what HTTP is to the web, or SMTP is to email.

Here’s how Anthropic puts it:

As AI assistants gain mainstream adoption, the industry has invested heavily in model capabilities, achieving rapid advances in reasoning and quality. Yet even the most sophisticated models are constrained by their isolation from data—trapped behind information silos and legacy systems. Every new data source requires its own custom implementation, making truly connected systems difficult to scale.

MCP addresses this challenge. It provides a universal, open standard for connecting AI systems with data sources, replacing fragmented integrations with a single protocol. The result is a simpler, more reliable way to give AI systems access to the data they need.

Since its announcement, MCP has been widely adopted by companies and platforms such as Zapier, Notion, Google, Figma, OpenAI, Salesforce, and many others.

The result is a universal pathway for AI assistants to plug into APIs and data sources, and autonomously interact with them based on a request, or prompt, made by the user.

Here are a few examples offered by the ModelContextProtocol.io on what MCP can enable:

• Agents can access your Google Calendar and Notion, acting as a more personalized AI assistant.
• Claude Code can generate an entire web app using a Figma design.
• Enterprise chatbots can connect to multiple databases across an organization, empowering users to analyze data using chat.
• AI models can create 3D designs on Blender and print them out using a 3D printer.

But what about the Apple stuff?

Based on code introduced in today’s betas, we can confirm that Apple is laying the groundwork to bring MCP support to App Intents.

If you’re not familiar with App Intents, this framework allows apps to expose functionalities and content to the system.

Here’s Apple:

The App Intents framework provides functionality to deeply integrate your app’s actions and content with system experiences across platforms, including Siri, Spotlight, widgets, controls and more. With Apple Intelligence and enhancements to App Intents, Siri will suggest your app’s actions to help people discover your app’s features and gains the ability to take actions in and across apps.

By adopting the App Intents framework, you allow people to personalize their devices by instantly using your app’s functionality with:

• Interactions with Siri, including those that use the personal context awareness and action capabilities of Apple Intelligence.
• Spotlight suggestions and search.
• Actions and automations in the Shortcuts app.
• Hardware interactions that initiate app actions, like the Action button and squeeze gestures on Apple Pencil.
• Focus to allow people to reduce distractions.

This means that based on today’s code, Apple plans to let developers use a system-level MCP integration to expose actions and functionalities within their apps to AI platforms and agents.

In practice, this means that soon, you could have ChatGPT, Claude, or any other MCP-friendly AI model interacting directly with Mac, iPhone, and iPad apps, autonomously taking actions within these apps, without developers having to do the heavy lifting of fully implementing MCP support on their own.

It is worth mentioning that today’s code points to a very incipient MCP support, so it could still be a while before we see this integration launch, or even be announced. But based on what is already there, this looks promising, and it is great news to help bring agentic AI to the Mac, the iPhone, and iPad for users and developers who feel ready to make this jump.

Have you been using MCP-enabled apps and platforms? Let us know in the comments.

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