Apple on Tuesday announced a major update to its flagship developer tool that gives artificial intelligence agents unprecedented control over the app-building process, a move that signals the iPhone maker’s aggressive push into an emerging and controversial practice known as “agentic coding.” Xcode 26.3, available immediately as a release candidate, integrates Anthropic’s Claude Agent and OpenAI’s Codex directly into Apple’s development environment, allowing the AI systems to autonomously write code, build projects, run tests, and visually verify their own work — all with minimal human oversight. The update is Apple’s most significant embrace of AI-assisted software development since introducing intelligence features in Xcode 26 last year, and arrives as “vibe coding” — the practice of delegating software creation to large language models — has become one of the most debated topics in technology. “Integrating intelligence into the Xcode developer workflow is powerful, but the model itself still has a somewhat limited aperture,” Tim Sneath, an Apple executive, said during a press conference Tuesday morning. “It answers questions based on what the developer provides, but it …