BEIJING (The Thursday Times) — Alibaba’s Qwen AI model will be built into Apple Intelligence on iPhones in China, the Chinese tech group has announced, opening the way for Apple to offer its AI features in one of its biggest markets.
Alibaba said the feature will go into testing in the iOS developer beta from November 4 and reach users with the official iOS 27.3 release in December. Qwen will work across Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence. It will only be available on compatible iPhones whose device location and Apple Account region are both set to China.
Users will be able to choose whether to turn the integration on and what information to share, and Alibaba said their requests and the responses generated would not be used to train its models. Chief executive Eddie Wu said the partnership would bring new AI-powered services to Chinese users.
Wang Xiaojie, an AI expert at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, said it was the first time a major global consumer hardware maker had adopted a Chinese large language model as its main system-level AI in the Chinese market.
Foreign AI models need local approval to operate in China, which has kept Apple Intelligence out of the country since its launch elsewhere. The deal comes as investors question the cost of the AI race, with Intel and the Nasdaq falling sharply this week and Alphabet losing $500 billion in a day.
