Apple Says Alibaba Qwen Will Power Siri Features When Apple Intelligence Reaches China
Apple says it will launch Apple Intelligence in China with iOS 27.3 in December, with Alibaba's Qwen built into Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence. The catch: Apple's newest Siri AI is not part of the release.
Chinese iPhone owners are about to get Apple Intelligence, and a good chunk of the smarts will not come from Apple. Apple says it will bring the first wave of its AI features to China with iOS 27.3 in December, with Alibaba's Qwen model handling some of the heavy lifting inside Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence. Testing starts Wednesday, November 4, in an iOS developer beta.
The announcement landed Saturday on Apple's China newsroom site, and Alibaba followed with its own statement. Per the South China Morning Post, it ends roughly two years of regulatory uncertainty in Apple's second-largest market. Apple has not given an exact December date.
Here is the catch. This is not the Apple Intelligence that American users are getting. Apple's release says it does not include the new Siri AI or the next-generation features shown at WWDC 2026, and The Verge reports that what China gets is the earlier feature set: notification summaries, live translation, rewriting and proofreading, visual intelligence and photo object removal. Reporting on Apple's release says Image Playground is also missing. SCMP counts around 18 features in the first batch.
Qwen steps in where Apple's newest Siri will not
Qwen is the workaround for the gap. Apple says it partnered with Alibaba to add Qwen support across three places. Siri can hand certain requests to it. Writing Tools gets a create function that generates text from scratch. Visual Intelligence lets people ask questions about what the camera sees, and users can also ask about photos and documents, according to Apple's release as relayed by TechNode.
It looks a lot like the ChatGPT hookup Apple launched elsewhere in 2024, a point The Verge also makes. The difference is that in China the outside model is a domestic one, which is likely the only way the product ships at all. That is my read, not something Apple has said.
"Qwen will draw on Alibaba's deep AI capabilities to integrate deeply into the various experiences of Apple's ecosystem, and together bring brand-new intelligent services to Apple users in China." Eddie Wu Yongming, Alibaba Group CEO, as quoted by Global Times
Privacy is where this will get scrutinized, on both sides of the Pacific. According to Xinhua's account of Alibaba's announcement, the Qwen integration is opt-in. Users choose whether to switch it on and what information to share, and can sign in with a Qwen account or Sign in with Apple. Alibaba says it will not use user requests or generated responses to train its models. That is Alibaba's pledge, and nothing in the sources lets us check it independently. Global Times adds that Apple asks for consent before any question, document or image goes to Qwen.
Eligibility is narrow. Alibaba says the Qwen features 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. Apple says the first release is iPhone only, and other platforms follow once the necessary approvals come through. Both device and Siri language need to be English or Simplified Chinese.
Regulators have already moved. The Verge reports Apple Intelligence was approved in China in July, and Global Times says it was among seven on-device generative AI services that completed filing procedures that month. It also reports that China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology approved the integration of Alibaba's AI models into several Apple handsets earlier this month. We have not seen the approvals themselves.
Qwen keeps turning up in unexpected places. Last week we covered Cohere's claim that a Qwen model tried to reach a Beijing server during a sandboxed test, a very different story, but a reminder that the model is now being asked to sit inside products people trust with their photos and messages.
The real test starts November 4. Developers in China will find out how well Qwen handles Siri's handoffs, and whether a pared-back Apple Intelligence is enough to move phones in a market where Apple has been playing catch-up on AI for two years. Apple's rivals there have had that time to build their own assistants.
