Apple's Chinese iPhones started thinking on Wednesday — with a little help from the competition.

Apple began testing Apple Intelligence in mainland China today via the iOS 27.3 developer beta, TechNode reports. Developers with compatible iPhones can enable the features now, ahead of a planned public release in December. It arrives nearly two years after the tools debuted in the US in autumn 2024, held back by regulators who only granted the Cyberspace Administration's approval in July and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's clearance to run Alibaba's models in October, according to Dataconomy.

What shipped is a first cut, not the current Apple Intelligence. The beta includes Writing Tools, Live Translation, Visual Intelligence, the Clean Up photo editor and Genmoji, plus summaries for emails, messages and notifications — 18 features in all. Alibaba's Qwen is wired into Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence: "Compose with Qwen" generates text and images from prompts, and "Ask Qwen" identifies what the iPhone camera sees. Qwen use is optional — sign in through an Apple account or a Qwen account — and Alibaba says requests and responses won't be used to train its models. Only iPhone 15 Pro and later qualify, with the language set to English or Simplified Chinese.

What's missing is the headline act: the next-generation Siri AI and the other new Apple Intelligence features Apple showed at WWDC 2026 are not in this release, TechNode notes. Wang Xiaojie, an AI researcher at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, called the arrangement the first time a Chinese large language model serves as the main system-level AI on a major global hardware maker's device in China.

The market noticed. Alibaba shares jumped about 5.7% on the October 31 announcement, with PDD and Baidu rising too, and Citi kept a Buy rating with a $193 target, saying the deal could speed Qwen adoption and demand for Alibaba's AI cloud workloads.

For Apple, the trial is the opening bid in its most important market, where local rivals ship new AI features monthly. The December public rollout will show whether a two-year-late, Qwen-powered Apple Intelligence can still move the needle.

— via TechNode