According to Bloomberg, Apple plans to officially launch Apple Intelligence in mainland China this December (12月) through the iOS 27.3 system update. The first batch will be the relatively basic feature set released in the US two years ago, covering iPhone, iPad and Mac, while this year's completely revamped Siri AI assistant is not on the list.
In fact, the path to launch has already been gradually cleared: the service passed the cyberspace authority's generative AI service filing on July 8, then obtained launch approval on September 29, and now only the final time window is missing. However, people familiar with the matter revealed that Apple's management is not optimistic about the near-term launch of the new Siri AI in China—the situation in the EU market is much the same, and it has not yet been scheduled either.
Baidu handles search and vision, Alibaba supplies the model foundation
The specific division of labor has surfaced. Bloomberg says Apple is cooperating with Baidu on search and Siri-related features, which matches previous disclosures by domestic media: the Siri voice assistant and Visual Intelligence will be embedded with Baidu services. Teardowns of the iOS 27 Beta 2 firmware by third parties have already uncovered a new module named "Baidu Visual Search", confirming the integration of visual search capabilities.
On the model side, Alibaba takes the lead. According to domestic media, Alibaba AI will be integrated into Apple Intelligence to provide mainland China users of iOS, iPadOS, macOS and visionOS with experiences such as text understanding, image generation and content creation. The September 29 approval also covered both Apple Intelligence and Alibaba's models, explicitly including Tongyi Wanxiang and Qwen.
Apple Intelligence itself is built from an on-device 3 billion parameter model plus a high-performance cloud model, supporting proofreading, image generation, search, and cross-app operations. By leveraging a local large model and search capabilities to bypass compliance hurdles this time, Apple clearly wants to hand the "brain" of China-market AI to domestic partners while safeguarding the system experience — though that most cutting-edge Siri AI will still have to wait a while longer.