Chinese tech company Alibaba has announced a partnership with Apple, according to a report by the news agency Xinhua on Saturday. Its Qwen AI model is to be integrated into Apple Intelligence. According to Alibaba, the feature is to be available for testing in the latest iOS developer beta from 4 November and to roll out to Chinese users with the official iOS 27.3 release in December. Xinhua cites Alibaba as the source of this information.
What is to be integrated
According to the report, the integration covers several operating-system functions: through Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence, Chinese users are to be able to use Qwen for text understanding and generation as well as image understanding. Users can, the report says, choose whether to enable the Qwen integration and what information to share. Alibaba states that it will not use user requests or generated responses for model training.
Who the feature is for
The feature is to be available on iOS for users who buy an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone in China, or whose device location and Apple Account country or region are both set to China.
Context
Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said that Qwen, drawing on Alibaba's AI expertise, will be integrated into Apple's ecosystem and, together with Apple, deliver new AI-powered services to Chinese users. Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications AI expert Wang Xiaojie is quoted as saying this is the first time a leading global consumer hardware maker uses a Chinese large model as the primary system-level AI backbone in China. Whether this marks a lasting trend cannot be derived from the source. The report also notes that China's cyberspace authority completed the filing of seven on-device generative AI services for smartphones in July, including Apple Intelligence. For German companies, it remains open what role such regional model variants will play in global platforms and whether this raises questions about data flows. The source offers no information on this.
Sources
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