Apple Foundation Models MCP Server

Expose Apple's on-device 3B parameter LLM to Claude Code and Claude Desktop via MCP. Zero API cost, fully private, runs on Neural Engine.

Requirements

• macOS 26+ (Tahoe or later)
• Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4)
• Apple Intelligence enabled in System Settings
• Python 3.10+

Install

pip install apple-fm-mcp

Configure

Add to your Claude Code config (~/.claude/mcp.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apple-fm": {
      "command": "apple-fm-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Or Claude Desktop (~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apple-fm": {
      "command": "apple-fm-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Tools

Tool	Description	Latency
fm_generate	Free-form text generation	~1s
fm_summarize	Summarize text into bullet points	~4s
fm_classify	Classify text into categories	~2s
fm_extract	Extract structured data from text	~3s
fm_status	Check model availability	instant

Why Use This?

• Free: No API keys, no tokens, no cloud costs
• Private: All inference on-device, no data leaves your Mac
• Fast: Neural Engine optimized, ~1s for generation
• Complementary: Use alongside Claude for tasks where on-device speed matters

When to Use Apple FM vs Claude

Task	Use Apple FM	Use Claude
Quick classification	Yes	Overkill
Text summarization	Yes (short text)	Yes (long documents)
Code generation	No	Yes
Complex reasoning	No	Yes
Data extraction	Yes (simple)	Yes (complex)
Privacy-critical	Yes	Depends

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License

MIT