On iPhones sold in China, Siri will tap Alibaba's AI starting in December

On October 31, Alibaba announced a partnership with Apple. According to The Next Web, Apple confirmed in a post on its newsroom that its artificial intelligence features, grouped under the name Apple Intelligence, will arrive in mainland China with iOS 27.3 in December. They will rely on Qwen, Alibaba's family of AI models.

Developers will be able to test the features from November 4 in the iOS 27.3 beta. The rollout to everyone is planned for December, about two years after Apple Intelligence debuted in the United States, according to The Next Web.

Where will Qwen appear on the iPhone?

Qwen will be built into Siri, writing tools and visual intelligence, the feature that analyzes what the camera sees. It will be able to, for example, answer questions about a photo or a PDF. According to the Seoul Economic Daily, citing Alibaba, users will choose whether to turn it on, and their queries will not be used to train the models.

The rest of the package is more conventional: live translation in Messages, FaceTime and Phone, the Clean Up photo retouching tool, Genmoji, and summaries and sorting of emails and notifications. It will require an iPhone 15 Pro or newer, with Siri and the phone set to English or Simplified Chinese, according to The Next Web.

The service will be limited to iPhones bought in China, or those whose location and Apple Account country are both set to China, the Seoul Economic Daily reports. An iPhone bought in France will therefore not switch to Qwen during a simple trip.

The new Siri AI assistant is left at the door

The big absentee from this launch is Siri AI, the redesigned assistant Apple unveiled at WWDC 2026. It is not part of iOS 27.3 in China. Europe is in a similar situation: Apple will not, for now, sell its HomeView smart display there, because it cannot offer Siri AI there.

It has been a long road. According to the Seoul Economic Daily, China's cyberspace administration only added Apple Intelligence to its list of authorized services in July 2026. The Next Web also reports that some features had briefly gone live in March, before any approval.

A showcase for Alibaba

Alibaba's chief executive, Wu Yongming, promises that Qwen will be deeply integrated into the various experiences of Apple's ecosystem. Quoted by the Xinhua news agency, Professor Wang Xiaojie of the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications sees it as the first adoption of a major Chinese model as the foundation of the AI system of a leading global consumer electronics maker in the Chinese market.

For European companies, this partnership confirms a trend: the same feature on the same phone can rely on a different AI model depending on the country. Teams that manage iPhone fleets in several countries will need to know which model processes their users' data. The November 4 beta will show how Apple divides the work between its own models and Qwen.