MacPaw and Liquid AI to Bring Local AI Inference to Setapp Developers

MacPaw, the developer of CleanMyMac and the Setapp subscription service, announced a partnership with Liquid AI on August 5, 2026. The company's Eney AI assistant will get a local mode built on Liquid AI models, aimed at developers building apps for the MacPaw ecosystem.

What is Eney, and why does local inference matter?

Eney is MacPaw's AI assistant, integrated into the Setapp ecosystem. Like most cloud-based AI tools, it processes requests on the company's servers. Local inference changes that: the language model runs directly on the user's device, and data never leaves the machine.

According to TechCrunch, this is exactly the version of Eney MacPaw is building, using Liquid AI models. Liquid AI specializes in compact language models that run efficiently on consumer devices such as laptops, tablets and smartphones, without a powerful GPU and without a cloud connection.

What will developers get from the partnership?

The initiative is aimed primarily not at end users but at developers of Setapp apps. Today, a developer who wants to add an AI feature to an app pays for tokens from a cloud provider such as OpenAI, Anthropic or another vendor. A local Eney with API access changes the equation: AI computation runs on the user's machine, token payments disappear, and privacy is built into the architecture.

For MacPaw, this is a way to set Setapp apart from competing platforms by offering developers an ecosystem with built-in private AI and no extra infrastructure costs.

• Partnership announced: August 5, 2026
• Technology: Liquid AI language models, on-device inference
• Who it's for: developers of apps for the MacPaw / Setapp ecosystem
• Key advantage: data is processed locally and not sent to the cloud

Who is Liquid AI, and why was it chosen?

Liquid AI is a US startup founded by people from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The company develops language models on a non-transformer architecture called Liquid Neural Networks (LNN). Compared with classic transformers, these models are smaller and run faster on consumer hardware, which makes them attractive for on-device scenarios.

Apple is building Apple Intelligence directly into iOS and macOS, while Meta* and Google are pushing their own edge models. Against that backdrop, Liquid AI occupies the niche of a "neutral" supplier of compact LLMs for independent platforms. The partnership with MacPaw confirms that independent ecosystems are also entering the local AI market.

According to

TechCrunch, MacPaw is building the local version of Eney specifically for developers on its app store, to give them access to AI capabilities directly on the user's device, without calling the cloud.

What this means

On-device AI is no longer the preserve of big platforms like Apple and Google. MacPaw shows that an independent app store can also build local inference into its ecosystem, and turn it into a competitive advantage for developers.

*Meta is designated an extremist organization and banned in Russia.