Even in the age of AI, the iPhone 17 series is flying off the shelves – despite Apple Intelligence being crippled in its current form. That said, the iPhone 17 has all the required hardware to run advanced AI models. The powerful A19 and A19 Pro chips feature GPUs with neural accelerators for faster on-device AI. The memory upgrade to 12 GB for the iPhone 17 Pro models and the iPhone Air should also help with AI tasks. There’s further evidence supporting that Apple is working hard to push AI features to its devices, courtesy of the iOS 26.1 Beta 1 release.
According to 9to5Mac, iOS 26.1 Beta 1 includes support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Introduced by Anthropic in late 2024, MCP has been quickly adopted by the AI software industry and is routinely described as the USB-C of AI apps. Built-in MCP support on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac will allow AI products to securely interact with apps and data on these devices. In theory, MCP support in iOS 26 might allow chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini to read data from various apps and perform actions on behalf of users.
What can MCP do in iOS 26.1 beta 1?
Apple added support for MCP in the first beta releases of iOS 26.1, iPadOS 26.1, and macOS Tahoe 26.1. However, that doesn’t mean users can enable agentic AI capabilities. Users cannot yet instruct ChatGPT to look for a specific email in one of their apps and then send a summary of that information to friends or coworkers. That’s the kind of convenience MCP aims to provide, but it’s not there just yet. At minimum, MCP support will allow Apple Intelligence to interact with other apps on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Future versions of Siri — including the one powered by ChatGPT — might use MCP to access data in apps to control specific device functions for the user.
According to 9to5Mac’s code inspections of this week’s beta releases, Apple is preparing MCP support for the App Intents framework, which allows apps to share content with Siri and Spotlight. Since MCP is widely adopted in the AI industry, it’ll probably be a matter of time until Apple makes it available to developers. Ideally, it should also allow users to pick their own assistant to replace Siri — without any loss of functionality. All of this is speculation at this time, though, as Apple is yet to reveal how MCP support will work on the iPhone.
