Alibaba's Qwen powers Apple Intelligence in China developer beta; shares rise nearly 5%

China has been the missing market for Apple Intelligence because of local AI rules. The iOS 27.3 beta resolves that with Qwen handling text and image functions in Siri, Writing Tools and visual intelligence. The redesigned Siri AI itself is not yet included. Participation is optional, and commercial terms are undisclosed.

Alibaba says it will not use requests or responses to train its models. That is a key assurance given Apple's privacy branding. Investors reacted quickly, sending Alibaba stock up nearly 5%.

The partnership mirrors Apple's Gemini arrangement elsewhere: Apple increasingly relies on partner models rather than building every foundation model in-house. Alibaba, meanwhile, says it is finishing pretraining for the Qwen 4 family (Max, Flash, Plus and 27B). r/LocalLLaMA is busy speculating about what Qwen 4 will bring.

Skeptics question whether Qwen 4 will be open-sourced, noting Alibaba's only first-party statement is a September note that it was in training. Watch the December public launch and any regulatory friction.