Alibaba's Qwen will power parts of Apple Intelligence in China, starting with iOS 27.3

Apple Intelligence is finally getting a firm path into mainland China, and Alibaba's Qwen model will sit at the centre of it. Alibaba Group said on Saturday, October 31, that it had reached a partnership with Apple to bring Qwen into Apple's AI features for users in China, according to a Xinhua report carried by CGTN. Testing starts in the iOS developer beta on November 4, and the company says the public rollout will come with iOS 27.3 in December.

What Qwen will do

Qwen will power capabilities in Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence, covering text and image understanding as well as content generation. The Apple Post reports that Siri will be able to hand certain requests to Qwen when broader knowledge is needed, that users will be able to ask questions about photos and documents such as PDFs and presentations, and that Writing Tools will be able to draft new text from scratch.

The integration is opt-in: users decide whether to turn it on and what information to share. Alibaba says it will not use user requests or the responses generated for them to train its models. Eligibility covers people who buy an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone in China, or whose device location and Apple Account region are both set to China. The Apple Post lists iPhone 16 and later models, plus the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, among supported devices, with Siri and device language set to English or Simplified Chinese.

What is left out

The December release brings the first core Apple Intelligence features to China, including Writing Tools, notification summaries, Genmoji and the Clean Up photo tool, but not everything available elsewhere. The Apple Post says Siri AI and the other next-generation features shown at WWDC 2026 are not part of the initial rollout, in line with a mid-October Bloomberg report relayed by MacTrast, iGeeksBlog and TechNode that also excluded Image Playground.

A long road through regulators

Apple Intelligence has been unavailable in mainland China since its 2024 debut, as foreign AI services face strict rules there. In July 2026, China's cyberspace regulator listed Apple's service among seven on-device generative AI services whose filings were complete. TechNode, citing Bloomberg, reported that Apple received permits in late September covering recent iPhones and Alibaba's models, and MacTrast notes that future model updates will also need approval. TechNode also reported that Apple works with Baidu on search and Siri-related functions, a role the October announcement did not address.