Apple quietly released a new operating system that almost no one noticed: An unnamed operating system surfaces in the Private Cloud Compute blog as Apple goes ballistic on AI
By now you’re very familiar with most, if not all, of the artificial intelligence, sorry “Apple Intelligence,” features it announced at WWDC 2024 – but during the unveiling the company went to great lengths to talk about the steps it took to protect user privacy.
To back up Apple Intelligence, Apple has introduced Private Cloud Compute (PCC). This cloud intelligence system extends Apple’s security and privacy standards to cloud-based AI processing. PCC ensures that personal user data sent to PCC remains accessible to no one other than the user, including Apple.
In a blog post discussing Private Cloud Compute and how it works to keep user data safe, Apple says: “Built with custom Apple silicon and a robust operating system designed for privacy, we believe PCC is the most advanced security architecture ever created. has been used for cloud AI. calculate to scale.”
Tailored to support LLM inference workloads
Yes, Apple says it wrote a hardened operating system. The company is not talking about the latest versions of macOS or iOS announced at WWDC, but about something completely different.
No details were given about this operating system, not even the name, but Apple did mention it later in the blog post.
After stating: “The foundation of trust for Private Cloud Compute is our compute node: custom server hardware that brings the power and security of Apple Silicon to the data center, with the same hardware security technologies used in iPhone, including the Secure Enclave and Secure Boot,” the company added, “we have paired this hardware with a new operating system: a beefed-up subset of the foundation of iOS and macOS, tailored to support Large Language Model (LLM) inference workloads while provide an extremely narrow attack surface.”
While we don’t know much yet about the new operating system Apple has designed for PCC, we will know soon. The company says: “When we launch Private Cloud Compute, we will take the extraordinary step of making software images of every production version of PCC publicly available for security research.” That includes every application and every relevant executable, and the operating system itself. Apple adds: “Software will be published within 90 days of log entry, or after relevant software updates are available, whichever comes first.”