Apple and Alibaba Bring Qwen AI to Apple Intelligence in China

Apple and Alibaba announced on October 31, 2026 that Alibaba's Qwen large language model will serve as the AI backbone for Apple Intelligence in China — the first time a major global consumer hardware company has adopted a Chinese-built LLM as its primary system-level AI in that market. Starting November 4, developers in China can test the integration through the latest iOS developer beta; the full public release is slated for iOS 27.3 in December. Through the integration, Chinese users will gain access to Qwen-powered capabilities inside Siri, Writing Tools, and Visual Intelligence, enabling text and image understanding, content generation, and contextual assistance. Users must actively opt in and choose what data to share; Alibaba has committed not to use user requests or AI-generated responses to train its models. The feature is limited to Apple Intelligence-capable iPhones with device location and Apple Account country set to China. The deal is seen as a landmark moment for Chinese AI in consumer technology and comes after Apple reportedly evaluated models from Baidu, ByteDance, Tencent, and DeepSeek before selecting Alibaba. The partnership was widely covered on November 1 as developer access opened.