Apple is building an app to run AI privately on your Mac

Apple appears to be working on a Mac app called Harbor that runs AI models on your own computer instead of a company's servers. Leaker Aaron Perris found signs of it and shared the app's description. It is currently in a private preview, which means only a limited group can try it.

What Harbor is meant to do

The description says Harbor turns a Mac into a private AI inference server. That is a machine that runs an AI model and answers requests. It works with open-weight models, which are AI models whose files are shared openly. They run locally on Apple silicon, and the description says your data never leaves your hardware and nothing reaches the cloud.

• Runs AI models on the Mac itself, with nothing sent to the cloud.
• Links several Macs over Thunderbolt 5 to pool their memory.
• Pooling allows bigger models and more requests at once than one Mac could handle.

The report notes that Macs have grown more popular this year, including as tools for running AI locally on models like the Mac Studio and Mac mini.

What is not known yet

The app sits under Apple's Claris brand in its private preview. 9to5Mac expects a public launch in the coming weeks or months, but that is a guess, not an announcement. Price, supported Macs and which AI models will work are not stated. For anyone wary of sending business or family data to cloud AI tools, Harbor could become a private option on a Mac they already own.