Apple Intelligence in China will run on Alibaba's Qwen model

What Alibaba announced

Alibaba Group said on Saturday that it is working with Apple to build its Qwen AI model into Apple Intelligence, the set of AI features Apple has added to its phones. As chinadailyhk reported, the feature will be open to developers for testing in the newest iOS developer beta from Nov 4. A developer beta is an early version of the operating system that app makers and testers try before everyone else.

Alibaba says the general rollout to Chinese users will arrive with the official iOS 27.3 release in December. Qwen is the name of Alibaba's family of AI models, meaning the trained software that reads and writes text and interprets images.

Where Qwen shows up on the phone

Qwen will sit behind three existing parts of the iPhone. Siri is the voice assistant. Writing Tools is the set of helpers that rewrite or tidy up text you have typed. Visual Intelligence lets the phone interpret what its camera sees.

Across those three, Chinese users can lean on Qwen to understand text and images and to generate new content. In plain terms, you ask the phone something or hand it a task, and Qwen does part of the thinking behind the scenes.

Alibaba's chief executive, Eddie Wu, said Qwen will draw on the company's AI know-how and fit into Apple's ecosystem. The two companies plan to build new AI-powered services for people in China.

Who gets it, and what you control

The feature is not forced on anyone. Users decide whether to switch the Qwen integration on, and they can also decide which information gets shared with it.

Alibaba also made a privacy promise: it says it will not use people's requests, or the answers Qwen generates, to train its models. That is a company statement, and the source does not describe any outside check on it.

Eligibility depends on where you are. The feature is meant for people who buy an iPhone in China that supports Apple Intelligence. It also covers anyone whose phone location and Apple Account region are both set to China. Someone with an account tied to another country would not see it by default.

Why this is being called a milestone

Wang Xiaojie, an AI researcher at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, described the deal as a first. In his view, no leading international maker of consumer devices has previously put a Chinese large model at the center of its built-in AI for the Chinese market. A large model is the kind of AI system trained on huge amounts of data that powers chatbots and similar tools. He called it a significant step for the commercial use of homegrown models.

Regulation is part of the picture too. In July, China's internet regulator finished recording seven generative AI services that run on smartphones, and Apple Intelligence was among them. Generative AI means software that produces text, images or other content. That filing suggests the rules were being handled before the December launch.

Apple first showed Apple Intelligence at its Worldwide Developers Conference in 2024. Bringing Qwen in is one way those features can be adapted to a specific country.

What to take from it

For most readers outside China, nothing changes on their phone. The lesson is wider: the AI on a device is not necessarily one fixed brain. Companies can swap in different models for different markets, and the behavior of Siri or Writing Tools may differ as a result.

Details are still thin. The source does not say how Apple decides which requests go to Qwen, how it compares with other models, or whether any fee is involved. Those answers will likely emerge once developers begin testing and the December release lands.