Apple lays groundwork for agentic AI on iPhone, iPad, and Mac with MCP support: Report
Apple introduced the iOS 26.1, iPadOS 26.1, and macOS Tahoe 26.1 Developer beta update today and with that the company began laying work for adopting Model Context Protocol (MCP).
According to a report by 9to5Mac referencing code in the new updates, Apple could soon integrate MCP in its software. Introduced by Anthropic last year, MCP has quickly transformed into standard way for large language models (LLMs) to connect with everyday software.
MCP has been adopted by companies like Zapier, Notion, Google, Figma, OpenAI, Salesforce and more.
Anthropic defines MCP as:
”The Model Context Protocol is an open standard that enables developers to build secure, two-way connections between their data sources and AI-powered tools… It provides a universal, open standard for connecting AI systems with data sources, replacing fragmented integrations with a single protocol.”
Reportedly, Apple is planning to let developers use a system-level MCP integration to so their apps can share actions and functionality with AI platforms and agents.
The iPhone maker is said to be laying the groundwork for MCP support via App Intents which is a framework that allows developers to expose specific action and content from their app to the system and make them accessible via features like Siri, shortcuts app and widgets.
This could mean that, iPhone users could soon have ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or any other MCP-friendly AI model interact directly with Mac, iPhone and iPad apps and autonomously take actions within these apps.
As per the publication citing examples by ModelContextProtocol.io, MCP support in Apple devices could lead to:
- AI agents could tap into services like Google Calendar or Notion to act as highly personalised assistants.
- Claude Code might spin up a complete web app directly from a Figma design.
- Enterprise chatbots could link to multiple company databases, letting employees analyse data through a simple chat interface.
- AI models could craft 3D designs in Blender and send them straight to a 3D printer.
The report does note that the current code only hints at early MCP support and actual integration may take some time to launch or even officially be announced by Apple. However, with the planned MCP support, Apple could bring the power of agentic AI to Mac, iPhone and iPad users.
iPhone SE (2nd generation and later)
