Apple Intelligence is finally coming to iPhone users in mainland China, powered by Alibaba’s Qwen artificial intelligence model rather than ChatGPT, with testing set to begin on 4 November in the latest iOS developer beta and a public release planned for December with iOS 27.3.
Apple announced the rollout on its China newsroom, while Alibaba confirmed on 31 October that Qwen will be integrated into Apple Intelligence for Chinese users. The move brings Apple’s AI services to China about two years after they launched in the United States, marking a long-awaited step for iPhone owners in the world’s largest smartphone market.
Under the partnership, Chinese users will be able to access Qwen through Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence, for text and image understanding and content generation. Siri will be able to pass certain requests to Qwen, including questions about photos and documents such as PDFs and presentations, while a Compose option in Writing Tools will let Qwen generate original content from a prompt.
What users will get first
The initial rollout will include an improved Siri experience, including Type to Siri, alongside Live Translation in Messages, FaceTime and Phone, Writing Tools, Genmoji, Clean Up in Photos, natural-language photo searches, priority notifications, notification summaries and Smart Reply, among other features. Users will be able to access Qwen by signing into their accounts or using Sign in with Apple.
Apple said users will be asked for permission before a question, document or image is sent to Qwen. Alibaba said requests sent to Qwen through Apple Intelligence, and the answers generated, will not be used to train its models, a privacy assurance likely to matter to users trying the service for the first time.
Devices, eligibility and limits
The first batch of features will be available on supported iPhones only, including the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, iPhone 16 and later models, iPhone Air and iPhone Duo, with both Siri and the device language required to be set to English or Simplified Chinese. Support for other platforms will follow only after the necessary regulatory approvals have been obtained, Apple said.
Eligibility covers users who bought an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone in China, or whose device location and Apple Account country or region are both set to China. Notably, the December update will not include Siri AI or the other next-generation Apple Intelligence features announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in 2026, so Chinese users will receive the first generation of Apple Intelligence features rather than the newest assistant. Alibaba chief executive Eddie Wu welcomed the partnership, saying Qwen would be deeply integrated into experiences across the Apple ecosystem.
