FoundationModels guided generation: empty token masks and slow structured output on macOS 27 betas 5, 6 and 7

Hey everyone, hoping to compare notes on something we have been chasing since beta 5.

We have a Mac app that uses FoundationModels with @Generable types for structured output. Starting with macOS 27 beta 5, guided generation requests began logging tokenizer errors and our longer structured requests slowed from seconds to minutes. We are still seeing the same thing on beta 6 and beta 7. We filed it as FB24310823 on August 11 with a sysdiagnose and log captures.

The signature is easy to check if you want to see whether your machine does it too. Stream the log while your app generates:

log stream --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.tokengenerationcore"' --style compact

On our machine the inference service (TGOnDeviceInferenceProviderService, category guided) prints these two lines in matched pairs, thousands of times:

Generated an empty mask at recognizer index N allowedTokenIDs is empty. Something is likely wrong with the tokenizer

Some numbers from beta 7 today: 9,008 of those pairs in about five and a half minutes. The errors start about one second into the first request after a fresh app launch. Requests that normally finish in 4 to 12 seconds take 77 to 170 seconds or longer. On beta 5 we measured decode at roughly 0.3 tokens per second on the worst requests. Short requests still finish at normal speed but they emit the same errors while they run, and the structured content they return looks degraded to us. On betas 5 and 6 we also saw repeated asset release errors for instruct_300m.tokenizer and the instruct_3b tokenizer saying the asset is not marked as in use.

For what it is worth, a build that ran clean on beta 4 shows the same behavior on beta 5 and later with no app changes, and the same @Generable schema drives both the fast and the slow requests. But we know that does not rule out something on our side, and we would honestly be happy to learn this is our own bug since that would mean we can fix it.

So two questions. Is anyone else seeing this since beta 5? And if you spot something we might be doing wrong on our end, sessions we should be recreating, schema patterns that stress the constrained decoder, anything at all, we would really appreciate the feedback. If it does turn out you are hitting the same thing, a Feedback referencing FB24310823 would help a lot.

Thanks!

Thanks for the post, so you are in what beta 5? The title says 5,6 and 7 but on your post you said you are using beta 5 of macOS?

Anyway, you can see the status of your feedback in Feedback Assistant. There, you can track if the report is still being investigated, has a potential identifiable fix, or has been resolved in another way. The status appears beside the label "Resolution." We're unable to share any updates on specific reports on the forums.

For more details on when you'll see updates to your report, please see What to expect after submission.

Thanks for filing the bug if you using the beta released today macOS 27.0 beta 7, August 24, 2026, Build 26A5421a I would suggest to update your bug as still says beta 5.

Albert  WWDR

No we are on beta 7 now. We starting building apps for the new AFM 3 early in the beta cycle, we only started seeing this issue when beta 5 came along. In other words, we did not see this in beta 4, 3, 2, 1. We are seeing it in beta 5, 6, 7, so far.

I included the Feedback in case anyone else is seeing this issue they can tag that to group them together. Resolution is "Open" with less than 10 other Similar Reports.

@boxbot Thanks for letting us know when the issue show up and still remains in beta 7.

Thanks

Albert  WWDR

FoundationModels guided generation: empty token masks and slow structured output on macOS 27 betas 5, 6 and 7
 
 
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