Apple Intelligence Bug Bounty encourages researchers to test privacy claims

There is an apple inviting people to research to the Private Cloud Compute (PCC) system that handles Apple Intelligence requests that require more computing power. The company is also expanding its bug bounty program, offering payouts of up to $1,000,000 to people who discover PCC security vulnerabilities.

The company showed off how many artificial intelligence features (branded as Apple Intelligence) will be able to run on the device without having to leave your Mac, iPhone or other Apple hardware. However, for more arduous requests it will send them to the PCC servers it has built using Apple Silicon and up-to-date operating system.

Many third-party AI applications also employ servers to fulfill more arduous requests. Still, users don’t have much visibility into the security of these server operations. Apple, of course, has made a lot of noise over the years about how much it cares about user privacy, so poorly designed cloud servers for artificial intelligence could muddy that picture. To prevent this, Apple said it designed the PCC so that the company’s security and privacy guarantees are enforceable and security researchers can independently verify those guarantees.

For researchers, Apple offers:

As a bug bounty, Apple is offering payouts ranging from $50,000 to $1,000,000 for vulnerabilities discovered in several different categories. Apple will also evaluate any security issues for a potential award that “has a significant impact on PCC.”

The first Apple Intelligence features will be available to all iOS 18.1 owners next week. Some of Apple Intelligence’s bigger features, including Genmoji and ChatGPT integration, appeared in the first iOS 18.2 developer beta released yesterday.