Native LLM inference server for Apple Silicon. OpenAI + Anthropic API compatible. No Python. Includes MLX Core macOS app with chat, agent mode, and tool calling.
About mlx-serve #
OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible local inference for Apple Silicon — MLX and GGUF — faster than LM Studio on the same file. No Python. No cloud. No Electron.
mlx-serve is a native Zig server that runs any LLM on Apple Silicon — MLX-format models and every GGUF on HuggingFace (Qwen, Llama, Mistral, Gemma, DeepSeek V4 Flash, thousands more). It exposes OpenAI-compatible and Anthropic-compatible HTTP APIs out of the box, so the same http://localhost:11234 works with Claude Code, the OpenAI SDK, Continue, Cursor, Open WebUI, and anything else that speaks one of those wires. Ships with MLX Core, a macOS menu-bar app with chat, agent mode, MCP tool call…
Short names, org/repo HuggingFace ids, and name:tag all work. And because mlx-serve speaks the Ollama API (/api/chat, /api/generate, /api/tags, /api/embed, /api/pull, …) alongside OpenAI and Anthropic, your existing Ollama-connected tools — Raycast, Obsidian, Enchanted, Open WebUI, ollama-python/js — work unchanged: point them at http://localhost:11234 and keep your workflow, on a faster engine.
mlx-serve is an open-source project written primarily in Zig, with 337 stars on GitHub. It was last updated in July 2026.
brew install --cask mlx-core # GUI menu bar app