By Hamza Faisal

MacPaw, the company behind CleanMyMac and Setapp, has launched Eney, a proactive AI assistant that lives on Mac and iPhone — and its pitch is restraint.

In a year defined by AI agents that act on their own, Eney is designed to notice what needs attention, prepare the next step, and then ask before doing anything about it.

Unlike browser-based assistants, Eney is built for the Mac itself. It reads the context of the machine — the apps you work across, the files on your disk, the meetings on your calendar — and spots what is waiting before you do.

A call about to start. A meeting that needs a summary. A disk running out of space. Eney notices, drafts the next step, and puts it in front of you for approval, without forcing you to switch between apps.

Proactive, never autonomous

The core design choice is that Eney never acts alone. By default it pauses for confirmation on anything consequential: sending a message, changing a calendar event, moving a file.

Users decide how much autonomy to grant, dialing the assistant up or down as they get comfortable.

The launch ships with concrete tools. Eney Wand, triggered with Option-W, acts on whatever is visible on screen without switching apps.

Eney Spell corrects writing inside Mail, Slack, Notes and supported browsers. Meeting support transcribes calls at the system level, then prepares summaries, action items and follow-up invitations for review.

Scheduled workflows such as Morning Brief, Plan My Day and Weekly Review can run automatically or on demand, while system-health monitoring flags low disk space, memory pressure and crashing apps — with fixes requiring your sign-off.

Eney is available now for Apple-silicon Macs running macOS 15 or later, with an iPhone version on the App Store, priced at $14.99 a month.

Trust is the barrier, not adoption

MacPaw's framing is pointed: adoption isn't the problem, trust is. The company's own research of US Mac users, conducted in July and August 2026, found 81 percent had used an AI tool in the previous three months — but only 39 percent said AI was embedded in how they work.

People experiment with AI; they don't integrate it into daily habits. Eney is MacPaw's bet that closing that gap means acting before the user even formulates the request — but never without permission.

It is a deliberate contrast with the autonomous-agent wave that has defined 2026.

Seven years in the making

Eney is not a new idea. Founder and CEO Oleksandr Kosovan told 9to5Mac the concept originated in 2019 as natural-language commands for CleanMyMac.

Then came the LLM boom, then the agentic AI boom, and MacPaw kept reworking the assistant as the underlying technology changed — most recently as local AI models became powerful enough to handle complex tasks that once required large cloud models.

"Since 2008 MacPaw has built tools that take care of the Mac," Kosovan said in the announcement. "Eney takes the next step: not a chatbot, but a careful colleague — an assistant that lives on your Mac and iPhone and takes care of the work you do on them."

By Hamza Faisal