# Run Claude Code locally for free: mlx-serve on Apple Silicon

> Source: <https://dev.to/ddalcu/run-claude-code-locally-for-free-mlx-serve-on-apple-silicon-1m8l>
> Published: 2026-07-03 23:26:39+00:00

Claude Code is the best AI coding assistant available right now. But it calls the Anthropic API by default, which adds up fast on long sessions.

What if you could run it entirely locally - free, private, and on hardware you already own?

**mlx-serve** makes this possible on any Apple Silicon Mac.

mlx-serve is a native Zig server for MLX-format language models on Apple Silicon. It exposes OpenAI-compatible, Anthropic-compatible, and Ollama-compatible HTTP APIs - all on a single port, from a single binary.

```
brew install mlx-serve
```

That's it. No Python. No conda. No Docker.

Claude Code looks for `ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL`

and `ANTHROPIC_API_KEY`

in your environment. mlx-serve implements the full Anthropic Messages API, so you just point Claude Code at it:

```
export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://localhost:8080
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=local
export ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_MODEL=mlx-serve
mlx-serve --model ~/.mlx-serve/models/mlx-community/gemma-4-e4b-it-4bit --serve
```

Then launch Claude Code as normal. Streaming, tool calls, thinking blocks - all work.

Full setup guide: [https://mlxserve.com/claude-code-local/](https://mlxserve.com/claude-code-local/)

On Apple Silicon, mlx-serve achieves 35%+ faster decode than LM Studio on Gemma 4 E4B 4-bit. The server is written in Zig with no Python runtime overhead.

`/api/chat`

, `/api/generate`

, `/api/embed`

endpoints - works with Raycast, Open WebUI, Obsidian