Here’s how Apple Intelligence keeps privacy in mind versus the competition – 9to5Mac

Artificial intelligence has obviously been the industry craze for the past couple years. While large language models are incredibly capable, they’ve always come with a bit of a compromise: privacy. Ultimately, you’re still using a model hosted in the cloud, and all of your conversations are stored on some server.

Apple’s always had privacy at the core of its products – so in the months leading up to the debut of Apple’s AI features, many people wondered: how would Apple handle it? Today, we delve into exactly how.

On-device models

This one is a bit obvious, but Apple Intelligence features are powered by on-device models. That’s why there’s such a strict device requirement. You can only utilize Apple Intelligence if you have an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 16 model. On the iPad and Mac side, it’s a bit more lenient, with all M1 devices being supported.

Either way, that device requirement isn’t strict for no reason, it’s because running large language models on device requires a lot of power and a lot of memory. To be specific, it requires 8GB of unified memory, which Apple only begun shipping on the iPhone 15 Pro.

With on device models, any requests you make don’t leave your phone. Granted, not every Apple Intelligence request will run on-device. Apple also has private cloud compute for heavier requests, which I’ll explain in a bit. That said, for the most part, current Apple Intelligence features lean heavily on the chipset in your device, such as Notification summaries and Genmoji. This keeps your requests and personal information local.

Apple’s also expanded the capabilities of on device models this year at WWDC25, allowing developers to implement features using Apple’s on device models, otherwise known as Apple Foundational Models. This’ll potentially deter developers from using providers like OpenAI or Google Gemini for passing your private user data to, though there is the major fact that Apple Intelligence is only available on a small number of devices.

Private Cloud Compute

As alluded to earlier, Apple also has a cloud solution for handling Apple Intelligence requests. It wasn’t in action a ton during iOS 18, but it’s being utilized a fair bit more with iOS 26. For example, you can now use Siri Shortcuts to send prompts to Apple models, including cloud models.

Apple has an incredibly detailed blog post on how Private Cloud Compute keeps your user information private. In short, the system is built to not retain information – and you can verify that. On top of building the system in such a way that user data wouldn’t be accessible by Apple or an attacker, Apple wanted to release the software images for Private Cloud Compute, allowing independent researchers to verify Apple’s claims.

You can learn more about Apple’s Private Cloud Compute and how it works in our post here. It’s a rather interesting system, and is certainly industry-leading for server-based AI privacy.

ChatGPT Integration

Last but not least, Apple has a special deal with OpenAI to ensure that Apple user data isn’t retained by OpenAI, and that Apple user requests aren’t utilized in training data for future models. There’s also the fact that requests are never sent to ChatGPT without the user providing permission.

Last month, The New York Times sued OpenAI, and the court demanded that OpenAI needs to retain ChatGPT user data indefinitely. Traditionally, OpenAI deletes this data from its systems within 30 days.

Some people have wondered if that impacts Apple users, but rest assured, OpenAI has stated that business customers utilizing Zero Data Retention APIs aren’t impacted, because OpenAI wouldn’t have stored that data at any point.

Given this fact, using ChatGPT through Siri is technically the most private way of accessing those models – highlighting Apple’s underlying commitment to user privacy, even in the age of AI.

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