Apple Intelligence Finally Reaches Chinese iPhones, Powered by Alibaba's Qwen
On October 31, Apple announced that Apple Intelligence will launch in mainland China this December, with Alibaba's Qwen model built in. The announcement ends a two-year wait for Chinese iPhone users — and it is as much a story about how China's AI rules shape global products as about new features.
For more than two years, the Chinese version of Apple's website has carried a tagline promising that the iPhone was "built for Apple Intelligence" — a feature Chinese users could read about but not switch on. That ended on Friday. Apple announced that Apple Intelligence will come to mainland China: the first functions open for testing on November 4 with the iOS 27.3 developer beta, and the full launch follows in December with the release of iOS 27.3. The news was confirmed in detail by Red Star Capital Bureau, and it marks the first substantive rollout in China since the feature was unveiled in June 2024.
The model inside is not Apple's own, and not OpenAI's either. Under a partnership announced the same morning, Alibaba's Qwen (通义千问) is integrated system-wide: Siri can call on Qwen to answer questions directly, Writing Tools gains a "Compose with Qwen" (千问创作) mode, and Visual Intelligence can hand photos and documents to the model for analysis. Users must opt in, and Alibaba says requests and responses will not be used to train its models. The Paper, which first reported the partnership, described users signing in with a Qwen account or Apple ID — no separate app required.
The reason for the two-year wait is structural. China requires generative AI services offered to the public to pass a government registration process, and the foreign models Apple relies on elsewhere — OpenAI's among them — have never been approved for public use in China. A deal with a domestically approved model was the only route in, which is why the partnership with Alibaba matters more than any single feature: it is the compliance architecture that makes the rest possible. Tim Cook had previewed the timing during a visit to Shanghai on October 15.
The first batch includes the features Chinese users have been reading about since 2024: Genmoji, rewritten and summarized text in Writing Tools, photo Clean Up, Visual Intelligence, and real-time translation. What it does not include is the redesigned, more conversational Siri that Apple has long promised — as 36kr's launch report put it in its headline, the "full-blooded Siri" still has to wait. That gap matters, because Siri's upgrade is the piece users actually touch most.
The launch lands at a good moment for Apple's standing in China's tech conversation. This week the site covered Apple defending the new iPad mini's 60Hz screen against skeptical Chinese reviewers; this week, Apple's market position itself moved. On October 30, Apple overtook Nvidia as the world's most valuable company — $5.03 trillion to $4.93 trillion — its first lead since briefly doing the same in late July. A China AI launch that actually ships, after two years of the tagline hanging on the website, is the best possible accompaniment.
The first beta builds reach developers' phones on November 4. The verdict that matters — how Qwen handles real questions in Chinese, on the phones of two years of pent-up users — arrives in December.