Get the latest tech news

Private Cloud Compute: A new frontier for AI privacy in the cloud

Secure and private AI processing in the cloud poses a formidable new challenge. To support advanced features of Apple Intelligence with larger foundation models, we created Private Cloud Compute (PCC), a groundbreaking cloud intelligence system designed specifically for private AI processing. Built with custom Apple silicon and a hardened operating system, Private Cloud Compute extends the industry-leading security and privacy of Apple devices into the cloud, making sure that personal user data sent to PCC isn’t accessible to anyone other than the user — not even to Apple. We believe Private Cloud Compute is the most advanced security architecture ever deployed for cloud AI compute at scale.

We paired this hardware with a new operating system: a hardened subset of the foundations of iOS and macOS tailored to support Large Language Model (LLM) inference workloads while presenting an extremely narrow attack surface. To guard against smaller, more sophisticated attacks that might otherwise avoid detection, Private Cloud Compute uses an approach we call target diffusion to ensure requests cannot be routed to specific nodes based on the user or their content. Every production Private Cloud Compute software image will be published for independent binary inspection — including the OS, applications, and all relevant executables, which researchers can verify against the measurements in the transparency log.

Get the Android app