Apple will finally bring Apple Intelligence to China this December through iOS 27.3, with Alibaba’s Qwen model handling many of the AI features. A developer beta rolls out on November 4, while the public release lands roughly a month later. This marks a full two years since Apple Intelligence first launched in the United States.
Users on supported iPhones will get Live Translation in Messages, FaceTime, and Phone. They will receive Writing Tools, Visual Intelligence, the Clean Up photo tool, and Genmoji. Mail and notifications will gain AI summaries and priority sorting. However, these features depend on hardware support.
Only the iPhone 15 Pro and newer models qualify. That list includes the iPhone Air and the recently launched iPhone Duo. Users must set Siri and the phone language to either English or Simplified Chinese.
The Qwen integration is the headline move. Chinese users can tap Alibaba’s model directly inside Siri, Writing Tools, and Visual Intelligence. For example, they can ask Qwen questions about a photo or a PDF on screen. China’s internet regulator cleared this arrangement back in July, and Apple reportedly trained a China-only model with Alibaba’s input.
One major gap remains. The new Siri AI assistant that Apple showed off at WWDC 2026 will not reach mainland China with this release. That revamped Siri recently added five more languages, but Chinese is still missing. However, Apple says users can type requests to Siri, and the system now handles conversation context better than before.
