Apple Intelligence to use Alibaba's Qwen model in China

Apple executive chairman Tim Cook says in Shanghai that Apple Intelligence with Alibaba's Qwen model has been approved and a beta will launch in China later in October.

The first features are real-time translation, writing tools and photo cleanup. Siri AI is not included in this release, according to the Leiphone report.

Earlier, an X post citing unnamed people familiar with the matter said Qwen would be built into Apple Intelligence in China across iOS, iPadOS, macOS and visionOS, offering text and image understanding and content generation without app switching. At that time neither Apple nor Alibaba had confirmed the report. Cook's remarks are the first public confirmation from Apple.