MacPaw has announced a long-term strategic partnership with Liquid AI, an MIT spin-off based in Boston, to jointly develop an on-device AI technology stack built specifically for the Mac. Eney, MacPaw’s AI assistant for macOS, is the first testing ground for the combined technology, with the company planning to extend the stack across its broader product line once it has been validated there.
The two companies are co-developing the underlying stack, combining Liquid AI’s Liquid Foundation Models (LFMs) with MacPaw’s own on-device components: Mnemos for memory and Elix for inference. Once the technology proves out inside Eney, MacPaw intends to bring it to CleanMyMac, Setapp, and its Moonlock cybersecurity division.
Liquid AI’s Foundation Models use an architecture that combines liquid neural networks with non-transformer designs. Unlike conventional transformer-based models, LFMs can adapt their internal processes based on new inputs in real time, and they handle extended input sequences without the steep memory and compute overhead that transformer architectures typically require. That efficiency profile fits on-device Mac hardware directly, where memory bandwidth and thermal constraints are real limits.
The architecture also has meaningful implications for privacy. A model that runs entirely on-device processes no user data through a remote server, which is a growing differentiator for productivity and security software aimed at professionals and enterprises. MacPaw’s decision to co-develop the stack rather than license a cloud API reflects that calculation, and it gives the company a degree of control over the underlying technology that a standard integration would not.
Eney was unveiled at CES 2025 as a Mac-native AI assistant built to complete tasks by tapping into the apps available through Setapp. MacPaw had already made a significant architectural shift before this partnership: Eney moved to local processing, with its ELIX engine (Eney Local Intelligence MLX) defaulting to on-device reasoning, contextual search, skill execution, and conversation history. In December 2025, a revamped version launched exclusively on Setapp ahead of an open beta period planned for Spring 2026. The Liquid AI partnership is intended to push that local-first approach further, building on the foundation MacPaw already laid rather than replacing it.
