Here’s how to turn off Apple Intelligence report in macOS Sequoia.

Apple’s generative AI, Apple Intelligence, also generates some usage reports. Here’s how to turn off the Apple Intelligence Report in macOS.

Apple’s much-anticipated AI features dubbed Apple Intelligence have been released for most Apple platforms on recent hardware. Public reception has been, shall we say, less than enthusiastic – with some reports claiming up to 73% of Apple users have no interest in the technology.

Others, such as BBC have complained that Apple Intelligence isn’t ready for prime time – with Apple devices reporting erroneous news headlines after creating summaries.

Media reports have also surfaced about massively increased storage requirements on devices on which Apple Intelligence is enabled. This is because Apple Intelligence works quietly in the background – silently collecting and analyzing information on your device while it’s on.

In some cases, Apple Intelligence storage requirements have been reported to have increased from an initial 4GB to 7GB per device – and this requirement increases in size over time. Increased Apple Intelligence storage requirements may lead to slower performance.

Apple has promised modular AI features in the future so users can download only the specific AI parts they want to use in order to save device resources.

Some Apple Intelligence features such as Image Playground may not appeal to all Apple users.

Apple has also tried to reassure users that Apple Intelligence is secure and preserves user privacy. One aspect of how it does this is by providing Apple Intelligence Reports – basically text summaries of what AI requests have been performed both locally on devices and on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute (PCC) servers.

Without getting into all the technical details, PCC uses a custom inference server which Apple calls The Inference Engine (TIE). PCC also uses a custom Apple Metal framework called MetalML which uses graphics shaders and compute kernels for inference computation.

When Apple Intelligence sends AI requests to PCC, it sends them to a PCC node that is running a TIE instance.

All Apple PCC requests are encrypted when sent to Apple so presumably even Apple doesn’t have access to request contents.

For the quick how-to section of this article for macOS reports jump to the end under “Apple Intelligence Reports on macOS” – but you should understand the background of how Apple Intelligence works on your Mac first.

You’ll need to enable it to use it

For privacy reasons, Apple Intelligence is off by default. To enable it, you’ll need to turn it on in the System Settings or the Settings app on your device. On iPhone, Apple Intelligence only works on iPhone 15 Pro, 15 Max, or iPhone 16 or 16 Pro. You’ll also need iOS 18.1 or later for iOS devices.

For Macs, you’ll need an Apple Silicon-based Mac and macOS Sequoia 15.2 or later. More updates to Apple Intelligence will be coming from Apple in 2025 and beyond.

Currently, Apple Intelligence is only supported in a few languages: namely localized versions of English for the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, New Zealand, and South Africa. Apple has promised more language support in the near future.

Note that even if your device is set to use one of those languages, Apple Intelligence still won’t work inside the EU or mainland China for legal reasons. Apple is currently working on bringing Apple Intelligence to those countries.

Enabling Apple Intelligence on macOS

To turn on Apple Intelligence, open the System Settings app on your Mac, then click Apple Intelligence and Siri in the column on the left.

On the Apple Intelligence and Siri pane, click the Get Apple Intelligence button. When you do you’ll get a small sheet with summaries of what you’re installing and a link to more info about privacy.

Next, click Set Up Now to start enabling Apple Intelligence – but read the below warning first.

There’s also a link about how Apple manages your data. Note that when you turn on Apple Intelligence it will begin gathering info about your Mac and the data on it. If you don’t want this, don’t turn it on.

Because Apple Intelligence includes Writing Tools it may or may not collect info about any writing you do on your device. Siri and Search now work also by gathering data and they are now tied into Apple Intelligence as well.

Click “Set Up Now” to finish installation.

The data Apple gathers is processed on its Private Cloud Compute servers (for complex tasks) and on your device locally. By adding machine learning to macOS and iOS, Apple Intelligence can better understand what your interests and tastes are, and how it can work on your device to provide the information you’re looking for.

There are a few other notes in the System Settings app which Apple provides to tell you how it uses your data:

“Information sent to Apple related to your searches is used to process your request and to develop and improve search results, such as by using your search queries to fine-tune Search models. It is not linked to your Apple Account or email address.

Aggregated information may be used to improve other Apple products and services. Apple may also send a limited, randomly sampled set of search queries to search tools for the purpose of evaluating and improving the performance and quality of Search”.

Also, note collection of your data is not just limited to Apple. By clicking Set Up Now and then agreeing you also authorize Apple to send your data to “trusted third-party service providers”.

So be aware of the implications for your info and data when using Apple Intelligence. There’s also a section where you can manually disable which apps Siri and Search can learn from – but developers have to build this support in for it.

Downloading and ChatGPT

Once you turn on Apple Intelligence on your Mac it will begin downloading the software including language models (LMs) used in AI analysis. This can take some time and the software is several gigabytes in size.

Apple also added support for OpenAI’s ChatGPT in macOS and in iOS 18.2 and later. To enable ChatGPT go to System Settings->Apple Intelligence & Siri and look for ChatGPT in the Extensions section.

You’ll need to click the Set Up button next to Use ChatGPT to enable it. There’s also a slider for enabling ChatGPT prompts in Siri.

Apple has a page describing how to use ChatGPT services on Mac.

Once these features are in place and working, Apple Intelligence begins collecting and sending info in the background continuously until you turn it off.

Apple Intelligence Reports on macOS

To see what Apple Intelligence has been doing on your Mac, go to System Settings->Privacy & Security->Apple Intelligence Report and set the report duration by clicking the popup menu on the right. There are only three options currently:

1. 15 minutes
2. 7 days
3. Off

As the settings pane warns, the report may include personal data such as messages and text you enter in writing tools.

To see the report, click the Export Activity button:

Set the report duration from the popup menu on the right.

When you do you’ll get the standard file Save pane where you can give the report a name and where you want to save it. The report is exported in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format.

You can read the report by opening it in any JSON-aware text editor, or see the raw JSON data by opening it in any plain text editor including Apple’s TextEdit or Xcode development environment. Some third-party JSON editors can format the JSON data for you to make it easier to read.

Also, see our more detailed article How to read the Apple Intelligence Report in iOS 18.1 for info on what’s contained in the report.

Essentially at the top of the report are two JSON nodes named modelRequests and privateCloudComputeRequests.

Each of these nodes contains an array of requests, each array element of which contains the request data itself.

Each request contains a timestamp, device, server info, and the encrypted text of the request itself (which you won’t be able to read).

To turn off Apple Intelligence Reports entirely, simply set the popup menu above to Off. This stops the collection of info on how Apple Intelligence is making requests.

Note when you do this it will erase all the currently collected report data – and there’s no way to recover the data once it’s deleted.

The Apple Intelligence Report doesn’t contain a lot of useful user-level info but it does summarize what requests were made, when they were made, and where they were processed.

When you turn off Apple Intelligence Reports, all report data will be lost.

Technical details

The first JSON node in the report (modelRequests) contains requests for both local and PCC requests. The second node (privateCloudComputeRequests) contains metadata used in PCC requests including:

1. pipelineKind
2. pipelineParameters
3. attestations

These can roughly be summarized as:

pipelineKind – Currently always “tie-cloudboard-apple-com” which indicates the request was sent to a PCC node that is running a TIE.

pipelineParameters – Additional request parameters that are visible to the PCC Gateway for routing decisions, such as models or adapters.

attestations – An array of attestation bundles of PCC nodes to which the device released the Data Encryption Key. Note that without this key PCC can’t read the requests.

Each attestations bundle contains a (Google) Protocol Buffer (Protobuf), which defines how the bundle data is to be formatted. Protobufs are essentially message-passing constructs for serialized information exchange.

Each bundle contains one or more AttestationBundle message structures which contain a byte count, ticket ID, hash (encryption) info, timestamp, and more.

There are several more structures in each bundle for additional security and encryption info. All PCC attestation bundles are time-sensitive and cannot be decrypted after a certain time has elapsed (google.protobuf.Timestamp key_expiration). This ensures bundles can’t be intercepted and stored for later use.

Bundles are also tied to their encoded Request Encryption Key (REK) and to the particular initial PCC node which contains a unique OS ID as well – ensuring sent requests can’t be copied or hijacked by other PCC nodes or malicious actors.

Each request also contains a Data Center Identity Key (DCIK) Certificate belonging to a trusted PCC node running on a verified Apple Silicon device.

These hardware integrity security measures make it virtually impossible for a PCC request to be sent to or processed by fake or malicious hardware – even by genuine Apple Silicon hardware that has been tampered with.

Overall, Apple Intelligence Reports provide a useful glance into what Apple Intelligence is doing on your devices and in PCC. Hopefully, Apple will expand these reports in the future to provide more information about what Apple Intelligence is actually doing.

For iOS also see How to get Apple Intelligence.