Alibaba wins Apple AI approval in China as tech split deepens

China’s cyberspace regulator has approved Alibaba’s Qwen model to power Apple Intelligence across the iPhone maker's entire Chinese ecosystem. The green light from the Cyberspace Administration covers iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS. "Qwen will be integrated into Apple Intelligence experiences," an Alibaba spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday.

The decision ends a regulatory slog that began when Apple unveiled its AI suite in 2024. While Apple and Alibaba struck their initial deal in February 2025, Beijing’s strict security evaluations and content filtering requirements pushed the actual rollout back by more than a year. Apple briefly activated the features on Chinese devices without permission in March, a misstep that forced the company to pull them and exposed it to regulatory risk.

Investors responded positively to the formalisation, pushing Alibaba’s US-listed shares up 3.7 percent. For Chinese consumers, the integration means they can access Qwen’s text and image generation capabilities directly within Apple’s system tools without switching applications. The approval places Alibaba alongside domestic competitors like Huawei on the government's list of sanctioned AI providers.

For European policymakers and investors, the deal underscores the reality of a balkanised technology sector. As Washington and Beijing vie for AI supremacy, global hardware leaders are abandoning unified software strategies. US lawmakers are currently exploring restrictions to stop American companies from using Chinese AI models. Conversely, Beijing recently ordered Meta to dismantle its reported $2 billion acquisition of Chinese firm Manus.

Alibaba sits squarely at the centre of these geopolitical tensions. The company recently barred its own employees from using Anthropic’s Claude. Anthropic has separately accused Alibaba of running the largest distillation campaign against its models. This makes the Qwen-Apple deal both a commercial victory and a geopolitical marker of which AI systems will drive the world's most valuable consumer devices in the Chinese market.

The technical challenge of running advanced AI on consumer hardware was highlighted separately by PrismML. The Caltech spinout, backed by Khosla Ventures, released compressed versions of Qwen on Tuesday. PrismML said it shrank the model from roughly 54GB to under 4GB, allowing all 27 billion parameters to run locally on an iPhone 15 or newer. Apple is reportedly in talks with PrismML regarding this compression technology.