Apple Foundation Models

This is Apple commoditizing LLMs while keeping control of the UX.

They are a hardware company and will keep selling the best machine for AI use. Well done.

I think this is just Apple planning for their on-device models getting better, which makes sense given they have access to Gemini now. If developers use this for all their code calling an external LLM, then as Apple's model becomes more capable and covers more use cases it'll be easy to switch to it at individual call sites. That'll give apps better UX and save developers money on a bill that Apple doesn't get a cut of.

While I'm happy with Apple introducing this abstraction. my main concern was with local models.

I'd love using Gemma4 as an example. but thinking of a user. if 10 Apps each uses same model and downloads it, the phone will be bloated.

I still didn't understand if Apple provided a way for multiple apps uses same on-device model (without tricky namespaces and permissions).

I didn't see anything suggesting that's the case.

Is this Apple encouraging developers to go through their api abstraction layer to use LLMs so that when they launch their own (which I think we’ve heard they’ve been spending lots of money on training and might be somehow involved with Siri or current Apple AI?) that they can easily help devs make a seamless transition? Or is it just a developer nicety or something else?

How can you practically use this in software if you're to deploy this to users? Asking a user to create and enter their own API key is a bar too high for good UX.

I’m surprised to see the model names hardcoded as an enum (e.g. `.sonnet4_6`), instead of a string with model discovery so that the user can select their preferred model without having to get a new app version through the App Store to support newer models.

This was expected. Apple will carefully choose what & how people can use AI in their ecosystem and will make sure of it. I hope "Apple Foundation Models" Eco-system grows with support from major model providers.

> A key bundled into an app is extractable from the shipping binary, and anyone who extracts it can make requests billed to your account. Use .apiKey for development only, and switch to a proxy before release.

I don't like this model. Then all the user data is visible to the proxy.

Far better would be some kind of micro payment architecture where a wallet is on the users device and coins are attached to each request.

We just need to live in the alternate universe where micro payments succeeded.

> Requests go directly from your app to the Claude API; Apple is not in the request path and does not see prompts or responses.

I know this is from a developer perspective. But as a consumer this is just funny.

Coding agent itself an imposed layer. Now they are adding one more layer? Many times I think of coding agent as the vendor supervisor from the body shops of the 90's who promise the customer everything under the sky and thrash the poor contractor to deliver. Coding agents consume 10x more tokens just like how body shops charged their customers vs how they paid the contractors. For a simple test, the same task that makes the model to go out of context length when used via a coding agent, runs fine when prompted directly.

Layers are luxury and remove control and transparency.

From app developer standpoint why would anyone ship claude keys like that ... or am I missing something? From consumer standpoint - I guess they can use their own keys but it is not something that is very user friendly as you can imagine.

> Usage is billed to your Anthropic account at standard API pricing.

While expected, it’s still a bummer.

the github repo: https://github.com/anthropics/ClaudeForFoundationModels

Does "Apple Intelligence" need to be Turned On for this as well?

So actually the most successful AI was OpenRouter Intelligence? Pronounced as OÏ.

This seems smart. Apple, despite not really leading in AI themselves, are right on the hot path of where developers are going to yolo slop into the ecosystem. Make a tonne of sense to define a nice clean API that places like Anthropic can build on top of and expose to developers.

It's also smart for them to make sure the billing is going direct from Anthropic to the developer. The initial thought is "That means Apple's not taking a cut", but from the other side of it, developers who use this API are going to have to expose that cost to customers somehow, and that translates to subscription/InAppPurchase etc. on top of which Apple will get it's 30%.

So where does the api key reside? You can’t ship it on the iOS client since anyone can read and abuse it

Misleading title. This is about Claude for Apple Foundation Models, not about Apple Foundation Models

Why would I want a nerfed model?

What it is

Apple's Foundation Models framework (shipping in iOS 27 / macOS 27 this fall) is the standard Swift API for on-device AI — the same API Apple uses for their own small model. This package makes Claude plug into that same API as a drop-in swap.

  // Apple's on-device model
  let session = LanguageModelSession(model: SystemLanguageModel.default)

  // Claude — same API, just different model constructor
  let session = LanguageModelSession(model: ClaudeLanguageModel(name: .sonnet4_6, auth: auth))

One API, two tiers. You write your app once against the Foundation Models protocol. On-device model handles fast/free/private tasks; Claude handles heavy reasoning, long context, or capability gaps — you swap the model, not your code.

You don't call the Anthropic API directly. Apple's framework handles streaming, tool calling, and structured output (@Generable) — you just get Claude's capability through it.