Apple Intelligence Cleared for China: Alibaba's Qwen Supplies the Brain, Baidu Plays Backup
After a two-year wait, Apple finally has its license to sell AI in China. The price: outsourcing Siri's brain to Alibaba.
Three key facts
China's Cyberspace Administration registered Apple Intelligence as part of a new batch of cleared on-device AI services. Reuters reported the registration date as July 15; the same list includes in-house systems from Chinese handset makers. The approval closes a gate that had been shut since Apple Intelligence debuted in the US in 2024 — Apple was reported to be in talks with Alibaba and Baidu as far back as February 2025, and briefly switched the features on for some users in March 2026 before pulling them back.
Alibaba's Qwen supplies the brain; Baidu plays backup. Under the arrangement, Qwen will power Apple Intelligence features across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS, covering both text and image understanding and generation. Baidu participates on a smaller scale, mainly providing search. Users in China tap an Apple icon; an Alibaba model runs underneath.
Apple has not announced a launch date. Historically, Chinese registration precedes an actual rollout by a few months, which lines up roughly with Apple's usual fall software cycle. Worth noting: with Apple Intelligence not live for a single day in China, Apple booked $20.5 billion in Greater China revenue last quarter, up 28% year over year, while iPhone shipments in China rose 24.4% — enough to retake the No. 2 spot in the market.
WangDou's Take
That third number tells the whole story by itself. Apple's best quarter in China happened precisely while Apple Intelligence was nowhere to be found — $20.5 billion, 28% revenue growth, 24.4% more units shipped, all sold without any AI in the box. The industry has spent two years insisting AI is the reason people upgrade their phones. Apple just filed an earnings report that says otherwise: people in China are still buying the screen, the chip, and the green bubble.
Then look at what actually got approved. A company that prints "privacy" and "on-device processing" on its keynote slides will now lean on Alibaba's model to answer its Chinese users' questions. Apple keeps the icon, the animation, and the name "Apple Intelligence." The brain is a rental. That's not humiliating — it's the cover charge for doing business in China. The genuinely awkward part is the calendar: a feature announced in 2024 may reach Chinese users in the fall of 2026, a two-year gap during which Siri itself got rewritten. By the time this dish reaches the table, the steam is long gone.
Source: TechCrunch · Engadget · MacRumors