Apple just open-sourced Core AI Models and it tells you exactly where on-device AI is heading.
It's the official toolkit for Core AI, Apple's new framework for running models locally on iPhone and Mac. No cloud, no API keys, no per-token costs.
Here's what's inside:
→ Export recipes that convert open source models from Hugging Face into Apple's new .aimodel format
→ Python primitives for authoring custom PyTorch models built for Apple silicon
→ A Swift package to run those models inside any macOS or iOS app
→ CLI tools to run exported models directly on your Mac
But the most interesting part is buried in the README.
Apple shipped official agent skills for Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Gemini CLI. Install the plugin and your coding agent learns how to export, compress, and deploy models on Apple silicon like an expert.
The skills cover the deep stuff: op compatibility, KV cache patterns, MoE, quantization and palettization for weight compression.
Apple writing documentation specifically for AI coding agents is a signal. They expect agents, not just humans, to be building on this.
A few things to know:
→ Targets macOS and iOS 27.0+ with Xcode 27.0+
→ BSD 3-Clause license, fully open source
→ Language models ship with tokenizers, diffusion models run as full pipelines
→ They are not accepting PRs at launch, but issues and model requests are open
Every iPhone becomes an inference machine. Local models, zero latency, full privacy.
Repo: github.com/apple/coreai-mode…