Apple's AI finally reaches China — powered by Alibaba's Qwen

Apple said on October 31 that Qwen-powered Apple Intelligence features will open for testing on November 4 in the latest iOS developer beta and roll out more broadly in December with iOS 27.3, bringing its long-awaited AI services to Chinese iPhone users more than two years after Apple Intelligence was first unveiled.

Chinese users will reach Alibaba's Qwen through Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence: Siri can call on Qwen's broader knowledge, users can ask questions about selected photos and documents including PDFs and presentations, and a “Compose with Qwen” function generates original content from a prompt, including text and images. Apple says users are asked for permission before a question, document or image is sent to Qwen, and Alibaba says requests and responses will not be used to train its models.

The catch is what is missing: the December update will not include the more advanced Siri AI capabilities or other next-generation features unveiled at this year's Worldwide Developers Conference. The first batch runs on iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, iPhone 16 and later models, iPhone Air and iPhone Duo, with device and Siri languages set to English or Simplified Chinese.