In China, Apple Intelligence swaps ChatGPT for Alibaba’s Qwen in iOS 27.3

iPhone owners in mainland China are about to get Apple Intelligence, and the outside chatbot it leans on will not be ChatGPT. Apple’s Chinese newsroom says the first wave of its AI features, from live translation to photo clean-up and email summaries, is coming to supported iPhones, with Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence handing some requests to Alibaba’s Qwen. The rebuilt Siri AI that Apple has been rolling out in other markets is not part of the package.

That closes the biggest hole in Apple’s AI rollout. iPhones sold in China have shipped without Apple Intelligence since the features first appeared in other markets, while phones from Huawei and Xiaomi arrived with assistants of their own. For a buyer in Shanghai or Shenzhen, it means the same iPhone finally does most of what it does in London or Madrid, with a Chinese AI company filling the role an American one plays abroad.

The list is long. Live Translation works inside Messages, FaceTime and the Phone app, and in face-to-face conversations through AirPods 4 with active noise cancellation or AirPods Pro 2 and later. Writing Tools rewrite, proofread and summarize text. Visual Intelligence identifies objects and places through the iPhone’s camera. Photos gets Clean Up for erasing distractions, natural-language search and Memory movies built from a typed description. Mail adds Priority Messages, email summaries and Smart Reply, and the lock screen gets notification summaries, priority notifications and a Reduce Interruptions focus. Notes and the Phone app can summarize audio and call transcripts, and Genmoji turns a written description into a custom emoji.

Qwen is where the China version departs from the rest of the world. Siri can pass certain requests to Alibaba’s model to draw on its broader knowledge, users can ask Qwen about photos and documents, including PDFs and presentations, and a Compose option inside Writing Tools lets it write original text from scratch. Access requires signing in with a Qwen account or with Sign in with Apple. The Verge noted that the setup mirrors the ChatGPT integration Apple added in other markets in 2024. Everything else runs on generative models Apple built itself, and Reuters reported in August that Apple had trained a model specifically for China.

The gaps are just as concrete. Siri AI and the other next-generation Apple Intelligence features announced at WWDC 2026 are excluded, and MacRumors reports that Image Playground is missing too. The rollout covers the iPhone only: the iPad, the Mac and other devices wait until Apple receives the necessary approvals, and the company gave no timeline for them. Supported phones are the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, the iPhone 16 and later, the iPhone Air and the iPhone Duo, so owners of a standard iPhone 15 are left out. Both the device and Siri must be set to English or Simplified Chinese. Apple’s announcement also says nothing about what Alibaba keeps from the requests Siri forwards to Qwen, a point Apple spelled out in detail when it brought ChatGPT into Siri.

Getting here took more than two years. Apple first showed Apple Intelligence in the summer of 2024, and the China launch slipped through rounds of talks with regulators. Reuters reported in mid-July that the features had cleared a major regulatory hurdle, and Bloomberg reported a couple of weeks ago that Apple was aiming for a December launch inside iOS 27.3, without Siri AI. That is exactly what Apple has now confirmed.

Testing starts on November 4 Beijing time with the next iOS developer beta, which MacRumors expects to reach US developers on November 3 because of the time difference. 9to5Mac pointed out that announcing a beta date in advance is unusual for Apple. The features then reach the public with the full iOS 27.3 release in December, for which Apple has not given a day. Outside mainland China nothing changes: Apple Intelligence and the ChatGPT option stay as they are, and Apple says Traditional Chinese, the script used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, is among four more languages Siri AI will support by the end of the year.

So the iPhone reaches its last big holdout market with Apple’s AI in a reduced form. Chinese buyers get the summaries, the translations and a Siri that forwards its harder questions to Alibaba, while the new Siri, the centrepiece of this year’s iOS, is the one piece Apple has not brought with it.

Tags: Apple, chatgpt, Siri, Alibaba, Apple Intelligence, Qwen