Towards the end of this year’s WWDC keynote, Craig Federighi said that Apple had “expanded” their vision for Swift Assist, and would bring native integration with ChatGPT, alongside support for other LLMs via API, directly to Xcode. Now, 9to5Mac can confirm that Apple is set to support native integration with Anthropic’s Claude as well.
Digging into today’s release of Xcode 26 beta 7, 9to5Mac found multiple references to built-in support for Anthropic accounts directly within the new “Intelligence” feature, along with specific mentions of Claude Sonnet 4.0 and a version of Claude Opus 4 released May 14.
This means that while ChatGPT remains the only model with first-party Xcode integration, the underlying support for Anthropic accounts is already in place, hinting that Claude integration could arrive sooner rather than later.
To be clear, while developers have been able to plug in Claude via API, Apple seems to be moving toward giving Claude the same level of native Xcode integration as ChatGPT got during WWDC 2025.
What was Swift Assist, again?
Originally announced back at WWDC24, Swift Assist was meant to be Apple’s answer to tools like GitHub Copilot: a built-in AI coding companion that would help developers explore frameworks, and write code. But it never actually shipped.
Now, even though Apple appears to have dropped the Swift Assist name, the feature is finally arriving in Xcode 26, with a broader scope than before. Rather than relying solely on Apple’s own models, it will support:
Apple’s own models;
Native ChatGPT support (with a daily cap, unless you log in or provide an API key);
The ability to plug in any third-party provider, including local models running on your own Mac.
Based on the code seen by 9to5Mac, it appears that Anthropic will gain the same native support as ChatGPT, which will certainly appeal to a vast portion of developers who claim this is the best coding assistant out there.
Apple and Anthropic have been talking for a while
Back in May, Bloomberg reported that Apple was testing a Claude-powered version of Xcode internally and was still debating whether to launch it publicly.
At the time, there were only rumors about an expanded Swift Assist feature, which, when it was announced, featured only OpenAI’s assistant, ChatGPT.
With today’s findings, it appears developers who prefer Claude over OpenAI’s models may soon get a more seamless, built-in experience. Otherwise, it’ll still work the same as any other provider. Just plug in your API key, and code away.
Based on server-side configuration files also seen by 9to5Mac, today’s findings also open the door to the possibility that Claude could be about to join ChatGPT as an alternative to Siri and the system’s Writing Tools. While that has no direct relation to the Xcode feature, it would make sense that Apple might choose to launch both in tandem.
Do you have a favorite LLM to assist you with code? Let us know in the comments.
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