Apple and Alibaba announced that Alibaba's Qwen model will power Apple Intelligence for users in China, handling text and image understanding and content generation in Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence. The feature reaches the latest iOS developer beta on November 4 and is set to roll out to the public with iOS 27.3 in December.
The integration is limited to Apple Intelligence-capable iPhones bought in China, or devices whose location and Apple Account region are both set to China. Users choose whether to enable it and what information to share, and Alibaba says it will not use requests or generated responses to train Qwen.
It is described as a first for a top global consumer hardware maker in China. China's cyberspace authority completed filings for seven on-device generative AI services for smartphones in July, including Apple Intelligence.