Apple Intelligence is finally coming to iPhones in China. Apple plans to switch it on in December with iOS 27.3, Bloomberg reports, about two years after the first features reached other markets. It’s the features Apple introduced in 2024, without the new Siri AI.
The launch includes Writing Tools, notification summaries, Clean Up for erasing objects from photos, and Genmoji for making your own emoji. Apple’s in-house image generators, Image Playground among them, stay out, and so does the newer Genmoji. Some text-generation features will also be limited in certain apps.
Apple has already said as much about Siri. Its September announcement says Siri AI and the other new Apple Intelligence features “will not be available in China” while it works through regulatory requirements. Siri AI isn’t on iPhones in the EU either, and Apple’s new HomeView smart display isn’t sold there for now.
Apple Intelligence in China runs on Alibaba’s Qwen and Tongyi Wanxiang models, which got Chinese permits for recent iPhones on September 29th, Bloomberg says. Unlike anywhere else, its guardrails were built with Alibaba, including a filter that lets the government approve ongoing updates to the models.
Apple is also working with China’s Baidu on search and Siri features. So the AI on a Chinese iPhone is a three-company job, and the government signs off on the models. That also fully-reflects recent comments made by Apple CEO John Ternus somehow.
Notably, Apple’s rivals got there first. Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo phones already offer their own AI services in China, and Bloomberg says it’s unclear how much Apple gains from a two-year-old set of relatively basic features. Apple also sits second to Huawei in China’s third-quarter phone shipments, IDC’s figures show.
We’d call two years a long wait for a proofreading tool. Apple Intelligence already works in simplified Chinese outside China: Apple’s September announcement lists it among the supported languages.
