Apple has invited those interested to explore the reliability of its Private Cloud Compute (PCC) system, which is designed for the implementation of resource-intensive tasks given to Apple Intelligence by artificial intelligence (AI). The company is ready to pay up to 1 million dollars to find a vulnerability in its infrastructure.

Apple has repeatedly emphasized that many of Apple Intelligence's AI functions run locally on the user's computer, iPhone, or whatever device they're using. But more complex requests are still sent to the PCC servers, which are built on Apple Silicon chips and run the new operating system.

Many AI application developers offer to perform query processing in the cloud infrastructure, but do not provide users with an opportunity to evaluate how secure these cloud operations are. Apple, which has traditionally made user privacy a priority, has called on independent experts to independently verify the security of its systems.

For that, the company has offered:

  • Safety manual with technical details of PCC operation,
  • "Virtual Research Environment" (Virtual Research Environment), which allows PCC analysis to be carried out on a computer. This requires a Mac with an Apple Silicon chip, 16GB of RAM, and the latest macOS Sequoia 15.1 Developer Preview.
  • Code published on GitHub for "some key PCC components that help implement security and privacy requirements."

As part of the bug bounty program, Apple offers rewards ranging from $50,000 to $1 million for bugs found in its products. iOS 18.1 is expected to be released next week, bringing the first Apple Intelligence features. Yesterday, the beta version of iOS 18.2 was released, which is intended for developers.