Apple now asks users before sending Apple Intelligence requests to Google Cloud

Apple’s AI now uses the power of Google’s Gemini to drive many of the new AI features that the company announced at its WWDC event last month. While the use of Google’s AI has led to a significant enhancement in the performance of the AI features offered by Apple, it also now means that some user data will be shared with Google Cloud to run these features.

As per a new report by 9to5Mac, Apple has added a new prompt in iOS 27 and even last year’s iOS 26 that requests users’ permission when their data is sent to Google Cloud.

Users have the option to allow permission once or automatically give permission for all such requests.

The prompt asking for permission from users was recently noticed while running the shape generation feature in iWork on iOS 26.

“Your text will be sent to Google Cloud to generate shapes. Your data is never used for training,” reads the message from Apple.

Notably, the standout feature of Apple Intelligence when it debuted in 2024 was Apple’s promise of keeping user data almost as secure as it is on users’ devices using the protections offered via its Private Cloud Compute. However, with Google being the brains behind many of the AI features that Apple is working on, the company now seems forced to rely on Google Cloud as the provider to run the advanced tools as well.

Apple’s expansion of Private Cloud Compute:

Apple had announced during WWDC 2026 that it was also extending support for its Private Cloud Compute to Google Cloud. The company said that Google-powered AI foundation models will run on Google Cloud infrastructure backed by Nvidia GPUs while using its own Private Cloud Compute architecture.

The company also said that running Apple foundation models on Google Cloud does not change its core privacy principles and that PCC continues to offer the same protections as before.

Apple said in a blog post that user requests remain stateless, their data is not retained and Apple devices will only communicate with software that has been cryptographically approved by the company.

“Together, these capabilities help ensure that even outside of Apple’s hardware and data centers, user data will continue to be protected by the full force of PCC’s extraordinary security and privacy properties. Regardless of where the infrastructure is hosted, Apple retains complete control over PCC software,” the company said.

“Apple devices will only trust PCC software that is cryptographically approved by Apple. PCC on Google Cloud will be gradually ramping towards the complete set of protections throughout the summer preview period,” it added.