It's insane that the source code of ANE is not available even to the MLX team, possibly one of the reasons Awni (MLX project head) left Apple.
* They haven’t said the source isn’t available to them, just that the closed nature of the ANE means they can’t use it in OSS.
* They’ve repeated constantly that it can’t do backprop and isn’t useful for most MLX use cases.
And really, ANE isn’t even that interesting for MLX really; it’s a limited resource power efficient inference engine for smallish edge models. If you want to use it you can use the Apple APIs, which while limited are generally “shaped” like what you’d want to do anyway. Almost every “biggish” CPU has one of these now and Apple don’t want to give away the specifics of theirs (even though it’s been pretty thoroughly RE’d by real REs and re-summarized by Claude, like this article).