Apple Intelligence is finally coming to China, with Alibaba’s Qwen inside Siri

Two years after it launched in the US, Apple Intelligence is finally coming to iPhones in mainland China, and the brains behind its smarter Siri there will be Alibaba’s Qwen rather than ChatGPT. Apple announced on its China newsroom that testing starts on November 4 in the latest iOS developer beta, with a public release to users in China in December with iOS 27.3.

There is a catch. Siri AI, the rebuilt assistant that arrived with iOS 27 elsewhere and has a waitlist of its own, isn’t part of the package. Apple says plainly that this update “does not include Siri AI or the other next-generation Apple Intelligence features Apple announced at WWDC 2026” (our translation from the Chinese).

What iPhone users in China get

The first wave is the core set most iPhone owners elsewhere have had since 2024 and 2025, which Apple says is powered by generative models it built itself:

• Live Translation in Messages, FaceTime and the Phone app, and for face-to-face conversations through supported AirPods.
• Writing Tools to rewrite, proofread and summarise text.
• Visual Intelligence, which tells you about objects and places through the iPhone’s camera.
• Photos: Clean Up to remove distracting objects, natural-language search and Memory movies made from a typed description.
• Genmoji, custom emoji generated from a description.
• Mail and notifications: Priority Messages, email summaries, Smart Reply, notification summaries, Priority Notifications and the Reduce Interruptions Focus.
• Summaries of audio recordings in Notes and of call transcripts.

Siri also gets the more natural voice and Type to Siri, which Apple says can follow you when you stumble over your words and keep track of context from one request to the next.

Qwen, not ChatGPT, inside Siri

The bigger change is who Siri turns to when it doesn’t know the answer. Outside China, Siri can hand questions to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Siri AI itself is built with Google’s Gemini. In China, Apple has partnered with Alibaba to plug its Qwen models into Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence, covering both text and image understanding.

For “certain requests”, Apple says, Siri can call on Qwen and its broad knowledge. You can also ask Qwen about photos and about documents, including PDFs and presentations, and a Compose option in Writing Tools lets it write original content from scratch anywhere in the system. To use it, you sign in with a Qwen account or with Sign in with Apple.

Qwen is the same family of models Cohere says tried to upload a file to Beijing during a security test, and the one behind Alibaba’s new Qwen AI glasses. Apple doesn’t say how requests to Qwen are handled or what data Alibaba sees.

“They chose to do business with us”

Alibaba first confirmed the tie-up in February 2025, when its chairman told an audience at the World Governments Summit in Dubai that Apple had shopped around before picking his company:

[Apple] talked to a number of companies in China, and in the end, they chose to do business with us. They want to use our AI to power their phones.

Joe Tsai, Alibaba chairman, speaking in Dubai, via CNBC

It has taken more than a year and a half since then to clear China’s rules, which require consumer generative AI services to be approved before launch. Even now, Apple says support for its other platforms, such as iPad and Mac, will follow only “after obtaining the necessary approvals”.

Which iPhones, and when

Apple Intelligence in China needs an iPhone 16 or later, iPhone Duo, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max or iPhone Air, with Siri and the device language set to Simplified Chinese or English. Live Translation through earbuds works with AirPods 5, AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation, AirPods Pro 2 and later, and AirPods Max 2 on the latest firmware.

Developers can test the features from November 4; everyone else gets them with iOS 27.3 in December. Nothing changes for iPhone owners elsewhere: Apple Intelligence is already available in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, India and most other countries, and Siri AI has just added Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese with iOS 27.2, though it remains off iPhones in the EU.

Why it matters

China is one of Apple’s biggest iPhone markets, and its phones there have been sold for two years without the AI features Apple built its marketing around, a gap that fed the sense that Apple is falling behind. Getting even a partial Apple Intelligence through China’s regulators, with Alibaba doing the heavy lifting, closes part of that gap, but the new Siri AI is still out of reach.

Sources: Apple Newsroom (China): Apple Intelligence features are coming to users in China; CNBC: Apple will integrate Alibaba’s AI into iPhones in China, chairman Joe Tsai says (February 13, 2025).