Apple’s Private Cloud Compute vs. Confidential Computing

You may have heard of Apple’s Private Cloud Compute (PCC), announced last year, that allows private access to Apple Intelligence. With all the discussion around this technology and confidential computing, along with the proliferation of “CC” acronyms in the security space, I often get asked: Are these the same thing?

The short answer is no. But here we’ll go through the long answer and compare the threat models of Private Cloud Compute and confidential computing to see which problems each actually solves.

What becomes clear in this…