Ben Jiang, reporting from Beijing for the South China Morning Post:
Chinese regulators have granted Apple a long-awaited licence to roll out its artificial intelligence service on iPhones in the country, with Alibaba Group Holding and Baidu serving as technical partners.
The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the country’s internet watchdog, published a notice on Wednesday confirming the licence for Apple Intelligence — the AI feature used to summarise emails, draft reports, edit images and perform other tasks. It was granted alongside six other smartphone-based AI services, including those for Samsung and Huawei Technologies.
An Alibaba representative told the South China Morning Post on Wednesday that its Qwen large-language model would “be integrated into Apple Intelligence experiences within iOS, iPadOS, macOS and visionOS for users in China”. This would allow users to access the model’s capabilities such as text and image generation, the representative said. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
A Baidu representative also told the SCMP on Wednesday that it was working with Apple to develop AI features for Apple Intelligence in China.
This isn’t about Siri AI, announced last month at WWDC for iOS 27 — this is the initial approval for Apple Intelligence, which was announced two years ago and rolled out in iOS 18. It’s unclear in any of this coverage today whether this is a green light for Siri AI this year too.