CMYK/Preview

At the top of an Ai window it says "CMYK/Preview".
In technical terms, what is Ai doing here?
Is Ai merely converting the CMYK numbers for the
document into the RGB numbers of my monitor space?
To put it another way, is Ai doing anything more
here than being a well-behaved color-managed app?
Thanks all.

If you switch the color model from RGB to one of the CIE spaces, you get the reading in that slot that the translation is being done by ColorSync. So if the CIE spaces require translation, presumably the RGB and Hex values are the actual values that would be shown on your display if your display were using its default profile.
The apple color picker actually has more sophisticated color translation capabilities when you sample colors with it, but you have to poke around in it to find them. It can give you readings in any output space for which you have a profile on your machine. Unless you are using ACE system-wide for your color engine, these translations will be done by one of the Apple color engines, so at this point you are definitely stepping outside the Adobe color management loop.
I also have the Art Director's Toolkit on one of my systems. It gives me different readings from the Apple DigitalColor meter, and does not tell me how these readings are derived, at all. However, I do see a similar very slight difference between the reading it gives me in Illustrator and in Photoshop.
The default color profile for any consumer level display (Apple, Samsung, Dell, etc.) is going to be very simple curve-based math. They use XYZ for the profile connection space.
The custom monitor profiles I make with Color Eyes display are 16 bit conversion tables using Lab for the PCS.
Obviously we are going to get much more complex, accurate math with a custom profile than with a generic canned one, both because the custom profile is actually accurate to the display, and because there is a lot more data to work with in the custom profile in making the conversions.
But I'm an artist, not a programmer, so we are now getting into your field, not mine. I need to make a custom profile for the monitor I am now using (it's new.) If I get that done, I may come back and repeat your experiment with Apple's color picker sampling and the actual profile I am using, which should be more accurate... but from what I have seen so far, I still doubt it would be an exact match between the two apps.
Your screenshot experiment would be another way to go. I haven't tried this.

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