Apple and Alibaba will integrate Qwen into Apple Intelligence in China; testing starts 4 November, with launch in iOS 27.3 in December.
Apple said in a press release on 31 October that the first Apple Intelligence features are coming to China and that, through a partnership with Alibaba, Chinese users will be able to use Qwen's text and image understanding and content generation directly in Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence. The features enter testing with the latest iOS developer beta from 4 November and launch for users in China with iOS 27.3 in December; other platforms will follow "after obtaining the necessary approvals". The first batch includes Live Translation, Writing Tools, Clean Up in Photos and notification and mail summaries, on the iPhone 15 Pro and later, iPhone 16 and later, iPhone Air and iPhone Duo. Apple said users will be asked for permission before any question, document or image is sent to Qwen; China Daily quoted Alibaba as saying requests and responses will not be used to train its models. China Daily said the cyberspace regulator registered Apple's on-device generative AI service in July, and that the December update excludes the new Siri and other features unveiled at this year's WWDC. The Verge said it marks Apple Intelligence's first arrival in China. Yicai/ifeng reported Alibaba's US-listed shares briefly rose more than 2% after hours.
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