macOS 27 ships a pre-installed `fm` command-line tool and a pip-installable Python SDK that expose the on-device Apple Foundation Model outside of Swift apps, enabling shell scripts, automation pipelines, and Python-based ML evaluation workflows.
ā¢ Developers can prototype and test Foundation Models prompts directly from a terminal or Jupyter Notebook without writing Swift or rebuilding an Xcode project.
ā¢ The Python SDK integrates with the rich Python ML/data science ecosystem (Pandas, Jupyter, etc.) making it easy to build evaluation pipelines that quantify prompt quality.
ā¢ The fm CLI's structured-output support (via `fm schema` + `fm respond --schema`) lets shell scripts consume model results as JSON, unlocking AI-powered automation without any API keys or cloud costs.
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.
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.
In-depth guide
iOS 27 On-Device AI & Apple Intelligence āiOS 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.