Alibaba's Qwen and Apple Intelligence team up

The integration means that Chinese users with Apple Intelligence-capable iPhones will access Qwen's AI capabilities directly through Apple's operating system, specifically via Siri, Writing Tools, and Visual Intelligence. This allows for tasks like text and image analysis, as well as content generation, drawing on Alibaba's AI expertise within Apple's established framework.

A notable aspect of this partnership is the reported user control. Alibaba states that users can choose whether to enable the Qwen integration and specify what information to share. Furthermore, Alibaba has committed not to use user requests or generated responses for model training, addressing potential privacy concerns regarding data handling by a third-party AI provider.

Wang Xiaojie, an AI expert at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, described this as a significant step for the commercial application of domestic large models. It marks the first instance of a top global consumer hardware maker adopting a Chinese large model as the primary system-level AI backbone within the Chinese market, following China's cyberspace authority completing the filing of on-device generative AI services for smartphones, including Apple Intelligence, in July.