Apple Brings Intelligence to China via Alibaba's Qwen — First Local AI Partner

Apple announced on 31 October 2026 that it is partnering with Alibaba Group to bring Apple Intelligence features to users in mainland China for the first time. The partnership centres on Alibaba's Qwen large language model, which will power key Apple features including Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence on iOS devices in China. Developer testing of the Qwen-powered features is set to begin in the iOS developer beta from 4 November, with a full rollout to consumers planned alongside the iOS 27.3 release in December. The feature is available to users whose iPhone was purchased in China or whose Apple Account country or region is set to China. Users can choose whether to enable Qwen and what information to share; Alibaba said it will not use user requests or model responses for training purposes. This is the first time Apple has built a local AI company's model into its core system AI — a significant concession to Chinese regulators who require data to be processed domestically. The partnership marks a crucial step for Apple, whose China revenue has been squeezed by competition from domestic rivals running locally compliant AI features on their hardware.