Apple’s AI Platform, Apple Intelligence, Makes Its Debut in China, Powered by Alibaba’s Qwen AI
In a significant development that marks a major shift in the global AI landscape, Apple’s generative AI platform, Apple Intelligence, has secured regulatory approval to launch in China. This launch is made possible by the power of Alibaba’s Qwen AI model. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has officially included Apple’s AI services in its list of approved providers, a mandatory requirement for any company offering large language models or generative AI services to the public in China.
As part of the agreement, Alibaba’s Qwen model will be integrated across all major Apple operating systems — iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS. This integration will provide Chinese users with seamless access to AI capabilities such as text and image understanding and generation, all within Apple’s native interface without the need to switch between apps. Apple’s sales in China had already seen a surge of 28% to $20.5 billion in the second quarter, and the company recently reclaimed the No. 2 spot in China’s smartphone market.
The announcement of the approval sent Alibaba’s U.S.-listed shares up by more than 6%. This approval concludes a lengthy regulatory process that began when Apple first introduced its AI suite in 2024. Apple had previously explored AI partnerships with Baidu, DeepSeek, and ByteDance before finalizing its collaboration with Alibaba. In related news, the startup PrismML — a Khosla Ventures-backed Caltech spinout — made headlines by compressing the Qwen model from roughly 54GB to under 4GB. This compression enables its 27 billion parameters to run entirely on an iPhone 15 or newer, with Apple reportedly in talks to license the technology.
Source: TechCrunch – Apple Intelligence approved for launch in China with Alibaba’s Qwen AI