Tech & AI
Apple Brings Alibaba's Qwen Into Apple Intelligence for China, With Testing From Nov. 4
Alibaba says its Qwen model will power Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence for Chinese iPhone users, with a public rollout in December.
HedgeWeekly Tech & AI Desk ·
Alibaba Group announced on Saturday that its Qwen artificial-intelligence model will be built into Apple Intelligence, Apple's suite of AI features, for users in China. Qwen is a large language model, the kind of software that understands and generates text and images. It will support Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence, the feature that analyses what a phone's camera sees.
Alibaba said the Qwen-powered features reach developers on Nov. 4 through the latest iOS developer beta, the pre-release software used for testing. Chinese users are due to get them in December with the official iOS 27.3 release. They will be available to people who buy an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone in China, or whose device location and Apple Account region are both set to China.
Alibaba said users can choose whether to switch on the Qwen integration and what information to share, and that it will not use their requests or the answers generated to train its models. No financial terms were disclosed. Chinese regulators completed filings in July for seven on-device generative AI services for phones, Apple Intelligence among them.
Why it matters: Apple has been unable to offer its AI suite in China since it launched elsewhere in 2024, and the tie-up gives it a route to restore those features in a market that matters for iPhone sales. For Alibaba, it is a high-profile consumer distribution deal for Qwen. Investors will watch the Nov. 4 beta for performance, the December rollout date, and whether other Chinese models are added alongside Qwen.