The AI Console palette is an assistant that lives in the app and can drive it: you choose the assistant (the built-in one with a daily allowance, or Claude, OpenAI or Gemini with your own API key) and pick from prompt presets. On a PDF the assistant knows this app's real PDF features — it advises you on what the app can actually do, honestly, rather than promising things it cannot.
The app can be driven by an external AI assistant (Claude Desktop, Codex, VS Code and other compatible assistants). Open Help ▸ MCP Server…, switch on Allow external control, copy the configuration it shows and paste it into your assistant. The setup page has the configuration for each assistant.
From then on the assistant can do the same things you can: open a document, read its info and the text of a page, list fonts, search for words and mark every occurrence (highlight, underline, strike out, circle, box), rewrite or restyle text, add new text, add notes, stamps, shapes and freehand strokes, place images, list and delete annotations, add, delete, duplicate, move, rotate and extract pages, apply and remove watermarks, list and fill form fields and tick checkboxes, save a page as an image, save — and undo or redo any of it. It does exactly what the buttons do, so nothing it does is a special case.
The app is also scriptable with AppleScript, behind the same "Allow external control" switch.