Apple Intelligence lands in China with Alibaba's Qwen

Apple has announced that the first batch of Apple Intelligence features will launch in China, teaming up with Alibaba to bring Qwen into some experiences. This is the first major step for Apple Intelligence in China since it launched in 2024. According to the announcement, Chinese users can use Qwen's text and image understanding and content generation inside Siri, Writing Tools, and Visual Intelligence. The features open for testing on November 4 with the iOS developer Beta, and roll out officially in December with iOS 27.3. Siri can pull knowledge from Qwen to answer questions, and users can ask Qwen about their own documents and photos. Writing Tools gets a Compose with Qwen feature for generating text and images from any topic, while Visual Intelligence lets users tap Ask Qwen to identify what they see. Alibaba stressed that users can choose whether to turn on the Qwen integration, and user requests and replies will not be used for model training, to protect privacy.