China Clears Apple Intelligence After Two-Year Wait

Apple Intelligence has a green light to operate in China. China's Cyberspace Administration (CAC) approved the service on July 15, ending a regulatory standoff that has kept the feature off Chinese iPhones for two years while it shipped everywhere else. The price of entry: Apple had to hand the AI engine to two domestic companies it doesn't control.

TL;DR

The CAC approved Apple Intelligence on July 15, 2026, with six other manufacturers' on-device AI services, including Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, and Nubia (a ZTE brand).
Alibaba's Qwen model replaces Google and OpenAI as the engine behind text and image generation on Chinese iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Vision Pro.
Baidu takes over Visual Intelligence, the camera-based lookup feature that ships with GPT-4o and Gemini abroad.
Apple explored Baidu, ByteDance's Doubao, and DeepSeek before settling on Qwen; the filing took roughly two years to clear.
Alibaba shares jumped as much as 7.9% in New York trading, Baidu gained about 4%, and Apple closed at a fresh 52-week high above $327.

What the Filing Actually Approves

Regulatory approval in China doesn't mean a feature ships tomorrow. The CAC's clearance covers the underlying generative AI service, the mandatory registration step that Beijing requires before any public-facing AI product can operate in the country. Apple still has to schedule the software rollout, and multiple outlets reported that the revised Siri capabilities Apple demoed at WWDC won't launch in China on the same timeline as the rest of the world.

What the filing does confirm is which company powers what. Alibaba's Tongyi Qwen model becomes the core engine across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS in China, handling text generation, image creation, and content understanding. A Qwen3.6-Max-Preview class model, Alibaba's current closed-weights flagship, is the kind of system now expected to sit behind those Apple Intelligence prompts inside China, though neither company has named the specific checkpoint in production. Baidu's role is narrower: it handles Visual Intelligence, the feature that lets a user point a camera at an object or screenshot and get an answer, a job that Google's Gemini and OpenAI's models perform in the rest of the world.

Why Two Years

Beijing requires foreign companies to route consumer-facing generative AI through a domestic partner rather than their own infrastructure. That rule, not a lack of technical readiness, is what stalled Apple. According to Caixin Global, Apple spent much of 2025 auditioning options, including Baidu, ByteDance's Doubao, and DeepSeek, before landing on Alibaba. The Qwen partnership was first rumored in February 2025 and the Baidu arrangement in December 2024, meaning the formal filing took roughly five months to clear once the vendor lineup was locked in, layered on top of nearly two years of prior groundwork since Apple Intelligence debuted globally in 2024.

"Qwen will be integrated into Apple Intelligence to bring intelligent experiences to users in China," an Alibaba spokesperson told reporters following the approval.

Baidu's statement was more procedural, confirming only that it's "working with Apple on developing Apple Intelligence features for Chinese users." Neither company has disclosed commercial terms, and Apple hasn't issued its own public statement on the approval.

Apple's Jing'an store lit up at night in Shanghai, with the Jing'an Temple visible behind it Apple's retail presence in China, including its Shanghai flagship, has kept growing even as Apple Intelligence sat blocked by regulators for two years. Source: apple.com

The Company That Got Squeezed Out

China's foreign-partner requirement doesn't just reroute Apple's China business through Alibaba and Baidu. It also writes OpenAI and Google out of one of the largest smartphone markets in the world. OpenAI has never secured the domestic partnership Beijing requires for consumer AI products, a gap that predates this approval and shows no sign of closing. That leaves the two companies that supply Apple Intelligence everywhere else with zero presence in the version Apple ships inside China.

That market weight is why the two-year wait mattered as much as it did. Apple posted $20.5 billion in Greater China revenue in the second quarter of 2026, up 28% year over year, and recently reclaimed the number two spot by smartphone unit share there.

Seven Approvals, One Day

Apple wasn't alone. The CAC cleared seven on-device AI services simultaneously on July 15, the first batch of approvals specifically for phone-based generative AI in China, according to Caixin Global. Samsung's Galaxy AI made the list too, pairing Baidu's ERNIE Bot with Alibaba's Qwen for its China-market devices. The five domestic vendors needed no foreign partner at all:

Huawei - Xiaoyi AI, running on HarmonyOS 5.0 and above
Xiaomi - HyperAI, built on its MiMo-V2 model series
OPPO - AndesGPT, developed in-house
vivo - BlueLM, also developed in-house
Nubia (a ZTE brand) - a Doubao Phone model built with ByteDance, timed for the World Artificial Intelligence Conference

A manufacturer source described the moment to BigGo Finance in blunt terms: "We must acknowledge that everyone is still in a very early industry stage right now." Five of seven approved services need no outside AI vendor. Apple and Samsung, the two foreign brands on the list, both needed one.

Baidu's headquarters building in Shangdi, Beijing, with the company's flags flying out front Baidu takes the smaller of the two roles in the arrangement, powering Visual Intelligence rather than the core language model. Source: Wikimedia Commons

What It Does Not Tell You

The approval says nothing about Apple's Private Cloud Compute, the server-side infrastructure Apple built to handle requests too complex for on-device processing without, in Apple's framing, ever storing user data. Whether Chinese regulators require Apple to route that server-side traffic through domestic infrastructure as well, or whether Apple's compute stack for China mirrors its global one, has not been detailed in any of the coverage of this filing. Apple has closely guarded the internals of Private Cloud Compute in every market it operates in, and China would be the market with the most reason to ask hard questions about it.

The approval also doesn't specify a launch date. "Regulatory approval does not equate to an immediate feature launch," one report on the filing noted, and Apple has a history of running separate release schedules for its China software stack. Whether Chinese users get Apple Intelligence with this quarter's iOS update or wait until next year is still an open question.

Markets read this as a win for everyone named in the filing. Alibaba stock jumped harder than Apple's on the news, which says something about how thin Alibaba's actual AI monetization has been until a distribution deal like this one lands. Qwen has spent two years as one of the most capable open-weight model families available anywhere, praised in research circles and downloaded constantly, without a marquee consumer product to put it in front of. Now it has one, on hundreds of millions of iPhones, chosen not because it won a bake-off on capability alone but because it was the domestic option Beijing would accept. That's the trade every foreign tech company in China eventually makes: control the interface, lose the infrastructure underneath it.

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