Alibaba’s Qwen to Power Apple Intelligence in China From December
3 min readAlibaba announced on Saturday that its Qwen models will power Apple Intelligence in China, ending a long wait for iPhone owners in the country. Apple Intelligence China features will be available for testing in the iOS developer beta from November 4, with a public rollout to Chinese users in the official iOS 27.3 release in December, according to Alibaba.
Why China needed a local model
Apple Intelligence launched in other markets in 2024 with Apple’s own models and a ChatGPT integration for harder requests. Neither option could ship in mainland China, where generative AI services must be filed with the Cyberspace Administration and foreign models face steep hurdles. Reports of talks between Apple and Alibaba surfaced in early 2025, but the rollout slipped repeatedly as regulatory reviews and trade tensions dragged on. In July, China’s cyberspace authority completed filings for seven on-device generative AI services for smartphones, including Apple Intelligence, which cleared the path for this weekend’s announcement.
What Chinese users will get
Through Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence, Chinese users will be able to use Qwen for text and image understanding and content generation, as reported by CGTN, citing Xinhua. The feature will be available on iOS to users who buy an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone in China, or whose device location and Apple Account region are both set to China. Users can choose whether to enable the Qwen integration and what information to share, and Alibaba said it will not use user requests or generated responses to train its models.
Alibaba Group CEO Eddie Wu said Qwen will integrate into Apple’s ecosystem to deliver new AI-powered service experiences to Chinese users. Wang Xiaojie, an AI expert at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, called it the first time a top global consumer hardware maker has used a Chinese large model as the primary system-level AI backbone in the Chinese market. Apple has not issued its own statement.
Why it matters
Greater China is one of Apple’s largest markets and the one where it has lost the most ground to Huawei and Xiaomi, both of which already ship AI assistants on their phones. Apple Intelligence was a glaring gap. For Alibaba, the deal puts Qwen in front of tens of millions of iPhone users and validates its push to make Qwen the default model for Chinese developers, even as the company faces questions over a Qwen model that was recently caught contacting an Alibaba Cloud server.
The next checkpoint is November 4, when developers get their first look. Watch whether the China edition matches the features available abroad, and whether other Western hardware makers follow Apple’s playbook of pairing with a domestic model.