To use AI without internet, you need an app that runs a language model locally on your device. On iPhone, download Cloaked from the App Store, choose a model from the in-app library, and wait for the one-time download to finish. After that, the AI works entirely on your device — no connection needed, including in airplane mode.
Most AI tools people use daily — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini — require a live internet connection for every single message. Your input leaves your device, travels to a data center, gets processed, and returns as a response. That architecture works well when connectivity is reliable and you’re comfortable with a third party handling your data. But there are plenty of situations where one or both of those conditions doesn’t hold.
This guide covers exactly how to set up and use AI without any internet connection, and when doing so is worth it.
Why You Might Want AI Without Internet
The reasons fall into two main categories: connectivity and privacy.
Connectivity is the straightforward one. Air travel still has significant coverage gaps — roughly 45% of global routes have no Wi-Fi. Commutes through tunnels, rural areas, international trips before you’ve got a local SIM, hotels with unreliable Wi-Fi — connectivity isn’t always available when you want to be productive. An offline AI assistant works regardless.
Privacy is the more important reason for most people who seek out offline AI specifically. When you send a message to a cloud AI service, a third party processes that content. Whether it’s stored, how long it’s retained, who can access it, and what happens if the company receives a legal request for user data — those are all questions you’re implicitly trusting the vendor to handle well. Privacy policies can change. Companies can be acquired. Security breaches happen.
An offline AI app sidesteps all of those questions at the architectural level. Your data doesn’t leave your device, so there’s nothing to store, breach, or subpoena. This matters more for some conversations than others — health questions, legal concerns, financial planning, anything professionally sensitive — but it’s a meaningful baseline for all of them.
For a deeper look at the full technical picture, see our complete guide to running AI offline.
What You Need
Setting up offline AI on iPhone requires three things:
A compatible iPhone. Cloaked works on iPhone 12 and later (A14 Bionic or newer) running iOS 17. Smaller models run well on any supported device, while larger models (3B+) perform best on iPhone 14 Pro and newer with 6GB+ RAM. iPhone 15 Pro and newer handle mid-size models comfortably. The older your device, the smaller the model you’ll want to use.
Free storage. Model sizes range from about 317MB for the smallest useful models up to roughly 4–5GB for models in the 7B parameter range. A 3B model — a solid general-purpose choice — is about 2GB. If your iPhone is running low on storage, start with a smaller model.
A one-time internet connection. You need connectivity exactly once: to download the app and the model file. After that, no internet is required at all.
Setting Up Cloaked for Offline Use
Cloaked is built specifically for this use case. It runs 15+ open-source models entirely on-device using Apple’s MLX framework. There are no accounts, no API keys, no subscriptions, and no data sent to any server — the architecture makes it impossible.
Install the app. Find Cloaked on the App Store — “Cloaked — Private LLM Chat.” Download and install it. This requires internet, but it’s the only time you will.
Choose a model. On first launch, you’ll see a model library. Each model has a description of its strengths and a clear size indicator. For most people, one of these three is the right starting point:
- Llama 3.2 3B (~2GB) — Good general-purpose model, fast on A15+ chips. Best first choice if storage is limited.
- Gemma 3 4B (~3GB) — Stronger reasoning and writing quality, best on iPhone 15 Pro or newer.
- Phi-4 Mini (~2.5GB) — Optimized for coding and technical questions.
Download the model. Tap to download. On a typical home Wi-Fi connection, a 2GB model downloads in 2–3 minutes. Once complete, the model is stored locally on your device.
Enable airplane mode. Once the download is done, turn on airplane mode if you want to verify it — or just start using it. The AI will respond to your messages with no network connection at all.
That’s the entire setup. There’s no login screen, no email to verify, no payment to enter. The model is on your device and the app runs inference locally.
What Works Offline vs. What Requires Internet
When you use Cloaked without internet, the core AI functionality works completely. This includes:
- Conversations — Full back-and-forth chat, as long as you want
- Writing assistance — Drafts, edits, rewrites, proofreading
- Coding help — Writing code, explaining errors, debugging assistance
- Brainstorming and reasoning — Working through ideas, planning, analysis
- Voice input — Cloaked’s voice input uses on-device speech recognition, so it works offline
- Text-to-speech output — Also on-device, also works offline
- Projects and persistent memory — Conversation history and system prompts are stored locally
One feature requires internet: web search. Cloaked optionally integrates DuckDuckGo search to let the AI pull in current information. That specific feature makes a network request to DuckDuckGo when you use it. The AI itself doesn’t — only the search query does, and DuckDuckGo’s own policy is that they don’t log or track searches tied to an identity.
If you want strictly zero internet use, simply don’t use the web search feature. Everything else runs locally.
Using AI in Airplane Mode: Practical Tips
A few things make offline AI sessions more productive.
Front-load your setup before a flight. Download the model you want to use while on Wi-Fi. If you want multiple models available, download them before you travel — storage allows you to keep several at once. There’s no switching penalty between models.
Be specific with your prompts. Offline models are smaller than cloud models. They respond better to clear, specific prompts than to vague ones. “Write a 200-word product description for a noise-canceling headphone for frequent travelers, focusing on comfort and battery life” gets better results than “write a product description.” This is true for cloud AI too, but it matters more with smaller models.
Use Projects for ongoing work. Cloaked’s Projects feature lets you create separate conversation spaces with custom system prompts — essentially persistent context. If you’re working on a specific project during a trip, set up a Project before you fly with the background context already loaded. The AI will have that context for every message in that project without you needing to re-explain it.
Keep the app open during long flights. Like any app doing computation, Cloaked uses more battery when actively generating responses. Between active use, the app is idle and uses minimal battery. You don’t need to close and reopen it, but keeping screen brightness managed helps extend session time.
Privacy: What “No Internet” Actually Means
It’s worth being precise about what running AI without internet actually guarantees — and what it doesn’t.
What it guarantees architecturally:
Your conversation inputs are never transmitted anywhere. They’re processed on-device and the results are returned on-device. No copy of your messages exists outside your phone. If you delete the app, the conversations are gone — there’s no backup on a server somewhere.
Cloaked extends this to the app’s analytics too: there are no analytics calls, no crash reporting to a third party, no usage statistics collected. The only data transmission the app makes is the optional DuckDuckGo search, if you choose to use it.
What it doesn’t guarantee:
An offline AI app doesn’t protect you from other apps on your device that might read the screen or clipboard. It doesn’t protect against someone with physical access to your unlocked phone. Standard device security practices — passcode, Face ID, encrypted backups — apply and matter just as much as with any other sensitive data on your device.
The architectural privacy guarantee is strong: there is nothing to intercept in transit because nothing is in transit. But it’s one layer of a complete privacy posture, not a complete solution on its own.
Summary
Using AI without internet on iPhone is practical and straightforward with the right app. The one-time setup takes ten minutes. After that, you have a capable AI assistant that works regardless of your connection status — on flights, in areas with poor coverage, and in any situation where you’d rather not send your conversation to a remote server.
Download Cloaked to get started. If you want to compare the offline AI apps available on iPhone before committing, see our Best Offline AI Apps for iPhone in 2026.