Apple makes every production PCC server build publicly available for inspection so that people not affiliated with Apple can verify that PCC does (and doesn’t do) what the company says it does, and that everything is implemented correctly . All PCC server images are recorded in a cryptographic verification log, which is essentially an indelible record of signed claims, and each entry includes a URL from which to download that individual build. PCC is designed so that Apple cannot put a server into production without logging it. And in addition to offering transparency, the system works as an important enforcement mechanism to prevent bad actors from setting up rogue PCC nodes and diverting traffic. If a server build hasn’t been logged, iPhones won’t send Apple Intelligence queries or data to it.
PCC is part of Apple’s bug bounty program, and vulnerabilities or misconfigurations found by researchers may be eligible for monetary rewards. Apple said, however, that since the iOS 18.1 beta became available in late July, no one has found any PCC flaws so far. The company acknowledges that it has only made the tools to analyze PCC available to a select group of researchers at this time.
Many security researchers and cryptographers tell WIRED that Private Cloud Compute looks promising, but they haven’t spent significant time digging into it yet.
“Building Apple silicon servers in the data center when we didn’t exist then, building a custom OS to run in the data center was huge,” Federighi said. He added that “creating a trust model where your device will refuse to issue a request to a server unless the signature of all the software running on the server is published in a transparency log is certainly one of the most unique element of the solution— and absolutely critical to the trust model.”
To questions about Apple’s OpenAI partnership and ChatGPT integration, the company emphasizes that the partnerships are not covered by the PCC and operate separately. ChatGPT and other integrations are turned off by default, and users must manually enable them. Then, if Apple Intelligence determines that a request is better served by ChatGPT or another partner platform, it will notify the user each time and ask whether to continue. Additionally, people can use these integrations while logged into their account for a partner service like ChatGPT or they can be used through Apple without logging in separately. Apple said in June that another integration with Google’s Gemini was also in the works.
Apple said this week that beyond the United States English launch, Apple Intelligence is coming to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom in December. The company also said that additional language support—including for Chinese, French, Japanese, and Spanish—will drop next year. Whether that means Apple Intelligence will be allowed under the European Union’s AI Act and whether Apple will be able to offer PCC in its current form in China is another question.
“Our goal is to bring the perfect everything we can to provide the best capabilities to our customers wherever we can,” Federighi said. “But we have to comply with regulations, and there is uncertainty in certain environments that we are trying to fix so that we can deliver these features to our customers as soon as possible. So, we are trying.”
He added that as the company expands its ability to do more Apple Intelligence computation on-device, it could use it as a workaround in some markets.
Those who gain access to Apple Intelligence will have the ability to do more than they could with previous versions of iOS, from writing tools to photo analysis. Federighi says his family celebrated their dog’s recent birthday with an Apple Intelligence-generated GenMoji (viewed and confirmed by WIRED to be very cute). But while Apple’s AI is meant to be as useful and invisible as possible, the stakes are incredibly high for the security of the infrastructure that underlies it. So how are things so far? Federighi sums it up unequivocally: “The launch of Private Cloud Compute was delightfully uneventful.”
