iOS 27 introduces security patterns and APIs for protecting agentic features built with Foundation Models and App Intents, including lifecycle event modifiers to inject deterministic security checkpoints into LLM-driven agent execution loops.
• Indirect prompt injection — where malicious instructions are embedded in calendar events, friend feeds, or tool results — is a real attack vector that can cause agents to exfiltrate data or execute unintended financial transactions
• The Foundation Models framework's lifecycle event modifier API lets you add deterministic guardrails (user confirmation, authentication gates) at specific points in agentic execution before risky tools fire
• Apple recommends a structured threat-modeling approach: identify untrusted context sources, audit tool side-effects, then apply mitigations at both prompt construction and action execution stages
Foundation Models is a new Apple framework introduced in iOS 27 that gives developers on-device access to the same Apple Intelligence language model powering system features, enabling text generation, structured output, and tool-calling entirely on-device without a network connection.
Visual Intelligence brings iOS 17's Visual Look Up capabilities to a new developer-facing API surface in iOS 27, letting apps pipe live camera frames or static images through on-device scene understanding to extract subjects, text, barcodes, and rich semantic labels without any cloud round-trip.
iOS 27 opens the Foundation Models framework to third-party LLM providers via a new public LanguageModel protocol, enabling anyone to integrate custom, server-based, or open-source models using the same Swift API as Apple's on-device system model.
In-depth guide
iOS 27 On-Device AI & Apple Intelligence →App Schemas let developers describe their app's content and actions using pre-defined domain schemas (like the Calendar domain) so Siri can understand, search, and act on app data without custom NLP. Entities conforming to IndexedEntity are donated to Spotlight's semantic index, enabling natural-language queries over app content.