Apple Intelligence & Privacy

Apple Intelligence is designed to protect your information.


Apple Intelligence is a system of generative AI models that are specialized to help you with your everyday tasks. Apple Intelligence can help you rewrite or proofread your emails or notes, summarize your missed messages, create custom memories in Photos, generate images, and more. Apple Intelligence is designed to deliver personalized intelligence without Apple collecting your personal data.

To provide a customized experience, Apple Intelligence uses information on your device including across your apps, like your upcoming calendar events and your frequently used apps. Apple Intelligence identifies the data necessary to provide to a generative model in order to best assist you, without requiring access to or storage of the data by Apple.

When possible, Apple Intelligence models run entirely on-device so that a task can be completed without data leaving your device. For example, when Apple Intelligence provides you with preview summaries of your emails, messages, and notifications, these summaries are generated by on-device models. There are times, however, when Apple Intelligence needs to leverage a model that requires more computational power than your device can provide on its own. For these tasks, Apple Intelligence sends your request to Private Cloud Compute. Private Cloud Compute is a server-based intelligence system designed to handle more complex requests while protecting your privacy. For example, when you use Writing Tools to proofread or edit an email, your device may send the email to Private Cloud Compute for a server-based model to do the proofreading or editing.

When you initiate an Apple Intelligence task, a model running on your device analyzes whether the task can be completed on-device. If a larger, server-based model is required, Apple Intelligence uses Private Cloud Compute to send only data relevant to your request to be processed on Apple silicon servers. The data sent to and returned by Private Cloud Compute is not stored or made accessible to Apple. The data is processed only to fulfill your request, after which point the results are returned securely to your device and are not retained by Private Cloud Compute. When your device sends a request to Private Cloud Compute, Apple only collects limited information about the request, such as the approximate size of the request and response, which features are used for the request, and how long the request takes to complete. This data does not include any information about the content of your request or the returned result. It is not identifiable or linked to your Apple Account or other data Apple may have from your use of other Apple services.

You can turn on transparency logging for Apple Intelligence on your device to see how your data is processed by going to Settings > Privacy & Security > Apple Intelligence Report and turning on Record Apple Intelligence Activity. After requests are made, you can export a file.

Published Date: November 6, 2024