Apple Intelligence is finally coming to China. On July 15, 2026, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) approved Apple's AI services for the country, clearing the way for Alibaba's Qwen model to power Apple Intelligence features across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS for Chinese users. The approval ends a regulatory process that stretched more than a year after the two companies first struck their partnership in February 2025.
Key Highlights
- China's internet regulator approved Apple Intelligence following a lengthy security evaluation and content-filtering review
- Alibaba's Qwen model will be "integrated into Apple Intelligence experiences" on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro devices sold in China
- The integration covers capabilities including text and image understanding and generation
- Alibaba's U.S.-listed shares rose 4% in pre-market trading on the news and climbed more than 6% during the session
- Neither company disclosed a specific launch date for the features
Details
Apple Intelligence debuted globally in 2024, but the suite of AI features — writing tools, notification summaries, image generation, and a smarter Siri — has been entirely absent from mainland China. Chinese regulations require generative AI services to pass a government security assessment and comply with strict content-filtering rules, which meant Apple could not simply ship its own models or its OpenAI-powered features in the market.
To solve the problem, Apple evaluated several local partners, including Baidu, DeepSeek, and ByteDance, before settling on Alibaba. The two companies reached an agreement in February 2025, but Beijing's evaluation process delayed the rollout for over a year.
Under the approved arrangement, Qwen — Alibaba's flagship family of large language models and one of the most widely adopted open-weight model lines in the world — will run the AI experiences inside Apple's operating systems in China. Alibaba confirmed the integration would involve "text and image understanding and generation," suggesting parity with core Apple Intelligence features available elsewhere.
Impact
The approval matters far beyond a feature checklist. China is Apple's most important international market, and the absence of AI features had become a competitive liability against domestic rivals like Huawei, which ship aggressive on-device AI capabilities. Apple's Greater China sales rose 28% year-over-year to $20.5 billion in the second quarter of 2026, aided by discount promotions that helped the company regain the No. 2 position in China's smartphone market. Adding Apple Intelligence gives the iPhone a long-missing selling point in the country.
For Alibaba, the deal is a landmark validation of Qwen. Investors reacted immediately, with the company's U.S. shares gaining over 6%. Powering AI on hundreds of millions of Apple devices positions Qwen as critical consumer AI infrastructure in China — a significant win in its rivalry with DeepSeek, ByteDance's Doubao, and Zhipu's GLM models.
The deal also illustrates the deepening bifurcation of the global AI stack: Apple devices will run OpenAI and Apple models in most of the world, Qwen in China — a template other Western platform companies may be forced to follow.
What's Next
Neither Apple nor Alibaba provided a launch timeline, though the features are expected to arrive via a software update to devices sold in mainland China. Attention now turns to how the localized Apple Intelligence will handle China's content compliance requirements in practice, and whether the Qwen partnership expands to future Siri upgrades built on large language models.
Source: TechCrunch