Alibaba's Qwen becomes the language model behind Apple Intelligence on Chinese iPhones
Developers can test the integration from Wednesday; Chinese users get it in December with iOS 27.3, as an option they have to switch on themselves.
Alibaba has announced that its AI model Qwen will be built into the Chinese version of Apple Intelligence. The Chinese tech company said it reached an agreement with Apple on Saturday, the Chinese state news agency Xinhua and the South Korean newspaper Seoul Economic Daily write. According to the latter, it is the first time Apple has worked with a local model developer since China's cyberspace regulator approved the service in July. Apple confirmed last week that its AI features will become available in China in December; it is now clear whose model does the work.
Users can call up Qwen through Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence, for understanding text and images and generating content. Developers can try the feature from 4 November in the latest iOS beta, with the official rollout following in iOS 27.3 in December. Users decide for themselves whether to enable the integration and which data they share. Alibaba promises not to use requests and responses to train its models.
The feature is available to anyone who bought a compatible iPhone in China, or whose device location and Apple Account country are both set to China. Alibaba chief executive Eddie Wu (Wu Yongming) speaks of new AI services that the two companies will offer Chinese users together. Wang Xiaojie, an AI expert at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, told Xinhua it is the first time a major international hardware maker has used a Chinese language model as the foundation of its system AI in China.