Following a report that Apple would have chosen Alibaba to power its Apple Intelligence features in China, Alibaba’s chairman confirmed the company is going to be responsible for bringing Apple Intelligence to iPhone, iPad, and Mac in the country.
According to Reuters, the chairman, Joe Tsai, announced the news during the World Government Summit in Dubai. “They talked to a number of companies in China. In the end, they chose to do business with us. They want to use our AI to power their phones. We feel extremely honored to do business with a great company like Apple.”
While it’s unclear if Cupertino will properly announce this partnership, many details remain unknown. For example, it’s unclear if Alibaba’s models will be responsible for powering Apple Intelligence by default or if it’s going to be similar to the OpenAI deal, which expands AI features through ChatGPT. If it’s the latter, this would mean that Chinese users could only take advantage of Apple Intelligence through Alibaba models.
With this partnership now official, we have to see how fast Apple will move to offer Apple Intelligence in China. When the company releases iOS 18.4 in April, the AI platform is expected to support several new languages, including Chinese. Still, it’s unclear if support for the language will also mean support for the platform in the region.
Apple Intelligence was first released in the US in December with iOS 18.1. While the Apple platform no longer requires users to be in the US, instead only using Siri in American English, it’s nowhere near what other players can achieve.
We expect Apple to start testing iOS 18.4 at any moment. While this software update was teased to bring on-screen awareness for Siri, Apple might delay this feature for iOS 19 or later, as the most expressive changes might come in 2026.
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