Apple Intelligence comes to China on Alibaba's Qwen, testing starts tomorrow
Apple's China Newsroom said on October 31 that Apple Intelligence will start testing on November 4 in the iOS developer beta. It ships to users in mainland China in December with iOS 27.3. Chinese iPhone users have waited about two and a half years.
The big change is the model. Instead of ChatGPT, Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence in China will call on Alibaba's Qwen. Alibaba says user requests and answers will not be used for training. Also, the head of Qwen says Qwen 4.0 and 5.0 will stay open source, against recent rumours.
In the same week, China published its first frontier AI export controls, Mofcom Announcement No. 48. It got 155 points on Hacker News, but our source gives few details.
The same phone will have a different AI brain depending on where you live. Who decides what that model filters, and will users be told? A promise on training is good; independent checks would be better.
