Apple plans to launch Apple Intelligence in China in December as part of iOS 27.3, Bloomberg reports. It has taken two years. The features first shipped elsewhere in iOS 18.1, and China has been the big gap ever since.
What's coming is the basic set: Genmoji, notification summaries, Writing Tools and Clean Up in Photos, per Bloomberg. What isn't: the new Siri AI assistant, Image Playground and Apple's newer image generation, and some text generation will be limited inside certain apps.
The South China Morning Post reported today that China's industry ministry has granted permits for Alibaba's Qwen and Tongyi Wanxiang models on the iPhone Duo, iPhone 18 Pro and older iPhones, which clears the way. Because China restricts foreign AI, Apple's version there runs on Alibaba guardrails, including a filter that lets the government sign off on model updates, with Baidu helping on search and Siri features.
The timing helps with the iPhone Duo going on sale in China next week. Still, Huawei, Xiaomi and the rest have shipped their own AI features for a long time, and a two-year-old feature set without the new Siri is a modest thing to show up with.
— via MacRumors