Apple Intelligence in China: Alibaba confirms Qwen, testing from 4 November
· BehindLines newsroom
It is now official: Alibaba's Qwen artificial intelligence model will power part of Apple Intelligence for users in China. According to the broadcaster CGTN, citing the Xinhua news agency, Alibaba Group announced on Saturday 31 October a partnership with Apple to integrate Qwen into its AI features.
A precise timetable
CGTN reports that the Qwen-powered feature will be available for testing in the latest iOS developer beta from 4 November. It will reach Chinese users with the official release of iOS 27.3 in December, again according to Alibaba. Qwen will be reached through Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence, to understand and generate text and images.
What Alibaba promises
Alibaba says users will choose whether to switch the integration on and what information to share, and that requests and generated responses will not be used to train its model. According to CGTN, the feature will be offered to people who buy an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone in China, or whose device location and Apple Account country or region are both set to China. Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu says Qwen will draw on the group's AI expertise to fit into Apple's ecosystem and to develop new services with Apple for Chinese users. Wang Xiaojie, an AI specialist at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, says it is the first time a leading global consumer hardware maker has adopted a Chinese large model as its main system-level AI backbone in the Chinese market.
Years of waiting and approvals
Apple Intelligence was first shown at the WWDC conference in 2024. According to CGTN, China's cyberspace authority completed the filing of seven on-device generative AI services for smartphones in July, Apple's among them. The website Hardware Busters, which dates the news to 15 July 2026, adds that the Chinese regulator's approval list also included Samsung's Galaxy AI and offerings from Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo and Nubia. The same site recalls that the tie-up with Alibaba had been rumoured since February 2025, that Baidu was the first partner considered, and that a source cited by Reuters spoke of both Baidu and Alibaba models being used. At the time, neither Apple nor Alibaba gave a launch date, a gap that Saturday's announcement now fills.