/macos-tahoe-apis

Apple Intelligence on macOS

On-device AI on macOS 26 ships through the FoundationModels framework — there is no AppleIntelligence module, no processingLocation switch, and no MCP (Model Context Protocol) support in Apple's SDK. The full, current API guidance (availability handling, sessions, structured output, tool calling, Private Cloud Compute, guardrails) lives in the dedicated skill: skills/apple-intelligence/foundation-models/ — read that, not this file, before implementing.

macOS specifics

import FoundationModels

let model = SystemLanguageModel.default

switch model.availability {
case .available:
    let session = LanguageModelSession()
    let response = try await session.respond(to: prompt)
case .unavailable(.deviceNotEligible):
    // Apple silicon required — Intel Macs are not eligible
    showUnsupportedUI()
case .unavailable(.appleIntelligenceNotEnabled):
    // User must enable Apple Intelligence in System Settings
    showEnableIntelligenceUI()
case .unavailable(let reason):
    showErrorUI(reason)
}

• The system model runs on-device by default; privacy is inherent to the framework, not a property you set. Larger workloads opt into Private Cloud Compute via PrivateCloudComputeLanguageModel (see the foundation-models skill's models-and-agents.md).
• Check availability every launch — model eligibility and the Apple Intelligence toggle are user- and hardware-dependent.
• Tool calling uses the framework's Tool protocol (see the foundation-models skill) — define tools there rather than inventing protocol layers.

References

• Foundation Models documentation
• skills/apple-intelligence/foundation-models/SKILL.md — the canonical skill