iPhones in China get Apple's AI features, powered by Alibaba's Qwen

Apple's AI features have finally reached iPhones in China, and the outside AI model behind them is Alibaba's Qwen instead of ChatGPT. The update needs iOS 27.3. It follows a year and a half in which the features were switched off on iPhones bought in mainland China.

What changed

Apple Intelligence is Apple's bundle of AI tools. It summarizes notifications and emails, rewrites text and retouches photos. Most of the work runs on the phone. Harder requests go to Apple's servers or, if the user allows it, to an outside model. Simplified Chinese has been supported since April 2025, but the features stayed off in China.

The reason was regulation. Every public generative AI service in China must be registered with the Cyberspace Administration of China, and ChatGPT is not available there. Approval came in July, with Apple Intelligence on the first list of approved services.

What Qwen does

Qwen is Alibaba Cloud's family of language models. Alibaba is the Hangzhou company behind Taobao and AliExpress. It plugs into the same three spots where ChatGPT appears in the rest of the world:

• Siri passes it questions that need broader knowledge than Apple's own model has.
• Visual Intelligence uses it to answer questions about a photo or a document.
• Writing Tools uses it in Compose to write original text from scratch.

Turning it on takes a Qwen account or Sign in with Apple. It is optional. Alibaba says users choose when to use it and what to share, and that requests and responses will not be used to train its models.

Who can use it

It runs on iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPhone Air, iPhone Duo and every iPhone from the 16 series on. Siri and the phone's language must be set to English or Simplified Chinese. iPhone Duo is Apple's first foldable, released October 23 and sold out right away.

Per Alibaba, Qwen is for people who bought a compatible iPhone in China, or whose device location and Apple Account country are both set to China. A tourist with a phone bought in London or New York and a home-country account stays on the international version.

What is missing

Siri AI, the rebuilt assistant Apple showed in June 2026, is not part of this update. Image Playground, the app that generates images from a description, is also left out. Chinese users get Siri with typed input and the handoff of harder questions to Qwen.

iPad, Mac and other devices must wait. Apple says support will come after the necessary approvals. Live Translation needs recent AirPods with updated firmware, paired with an iPhone that has Apple Intelligence on.