In today’s era of rapid AI development, Apple is actively seeking ways to introduce its AI technology to the Chinese market. However, this process is full of challenges and twists and turns, involving technical cooperation, data privacy, regulatory policies and other issues, and this article will delve into the complex situation behind Apple’s AI entry into China, as well as the dynamics and impacts of all parties.
On June 10, 2024, Apple officially announced its partnership with OpenAI at this year’s WWDC event, through which Apple integrates ChatGPT’s capabilities (based on GPT-4o, including image and document understanding) into iOS, iPadOS, and macOS experiences.
Regarding this development, some in the industry have called it the “ChatGPT moment for iPhones”.
However, it turned out later that this so-called “ChatGPT moment for iPhone”, although it increased the AI attributes of Apple products, had little to do with the Chinese market – after all, ChatGPT is not available in China.
As a result, in the Chinese market from 2024 to 2025, although consumers also buy iPhones that are said to be “ready for Apple intelligence”, they have nothing to do with the iPhone AI experience in the true sense, because Apple marks a line of small print on its official website in China: “The launch time of Apple intelligence is subject to regulatory approval.”
In fact, based on the technical and policy restrictions related to AI implementation and application, Apple has to look for AI partners for its own products from the Chinese local market in the process of seeking AI-oriented iPhone, Mac and other products in the Chinese market……
Judging from the latest situation, Alibaba and Baidu seem to be the partners chosen by the two Apples.
However, everything is still just a rumor, and there is no official confirmation; Apple officials are even more silent and are being targeted by the U.S. government – even, until the publication of this article in late May 2025, how Apple will implement AI in the Chinese market is still unknown.
The first threshold of cooperation
Regarding the implementation of Apple’s AI functions, there is actually a major misunderstanding in the outside world.
In fact, when Apple announced its AI landing strategy at the WWDC developer conference in June 2024, it essentially announced two core contents that are not in the same world: one is Apple Intelligence, and the other is Apple’s cooperation with OpenAI in artificial intelligence.
Among them, Apple Intelligence itself does not involve cooperation with partners.
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Judging from the official information, Apple Intelligence consists of multiple high-performance generative models that are specifically designed for users’ daily tasks, including users proofreading text and providing urgent email summaries, prioritizing pinned pushes, generating creative images, etc.
From the perspective of device landing, Apple Intelligence includes two sections: on-premises model and cloud model.
Among them, the local model refers to a language model containing about 3 billion parameters that can be run directly on the local device; The cloud-based model refers to a larger cloud language model that can be computed through a private cloud and run on Apple’s silicon servers.
However, whether it is a local model or a cloud model, it is actually Apple’s own research and has nothing to do with partners.
Of course, Apple also announced a partnership with OpenAI last year, and announced that iPhones, Macs and other devices can be connected to third-party ChatGPT.
In fact, Apple’s cooperation with ChatGPT in AI is very limited, mainly in the following two scenarios:
1. When the user enters the data query Q&A in Siri, Siri will prompt the user to connect to ChatGPT if they want more information – at this time, the user can choose to link ChatGPT or continue to use Apple Intelligence.
2. When the user uses the writing function, it will have a Compose function; When using the feature, the system calls ChatGPT’s capabilities.
In addition to the above two scenarios, all AI-related functions provided by Apple to ordinary users, including screen recognition, text processing, etc., are actually self-developed.
The reason why Apple does this is naturally based on its own product strategy of combining software and hardware, launching specific functions for users, and also providing third-party options when users need (third-party large language models); on the other hand, it is because of Apple’s data privacy protection policy, which is also Apple’s long-term “political correctness”.
Therefore, when Apple seeks third-party partners, it is also very picky.
So, what kind of selection criteria will Apple have when choosing a third-party partner?
In this regard, Apple CEO Tim Cook once mentioned in an interview with the Washington Post that he chose OpenAI for two reasons: the first is privacy protection, such as OpenAI does not seek to track IP addresses; The second is technologically advanced – after all, as Tim Cook says, “they have the best models.”
It is worth mentioning that Tim Cook also made it clear that Apple has also comprehensively considered the partners, not only that, Apple’s cooperation will not be limited to a fixed object forever.
If we consider the above background, it is actually easy to find that when Apple intends to demand third-party partners for its AI implementation in the Chinese market, it does not really have many choices.
Apple’s sway and entanglement
The landing of Apple’s demand AI is, in a sense, forced by Chinese mobile phone manufacturers.
In 2023, after Nvidia founder Jensen Huang shouted the world-famous slogan “AI’s iPhone moment has begun” at the GTC conference, China on the other side of the ocean began to embrace large models – among them, Chinese smartphone industry participants including Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, and Honor have successively entered the large model in a high-profile manner.
In this case, Apple’s attitude towards large models is cold on the surface, but in fact it is anxious.
A basic evidence is that Apple did not talk about words such as large models and AI at the WWDC event in June 2023, and even when it mentioned some AI-related functions, it chose to use words like “machine learning” instead.
Apple CEO Tim Cook mentioned in an interview after the event that he has used ChatGPT and is paying close attention to it, but it is necessary to regulate AI, and “companies also have a responsibility to supervise themselves” – the words are full of cautious attitudes towards AI.
Prudence is prudence, and while other mobile phone peers are promoting the implementation of large models, Apple still has to promote the implementation of AI.
In the second half of 2023, it was reported that Apple had assembled a strong AI large model development team, including John Giannandre, its senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, and others; In addition, it is also reported that Apple has almost integrated its large model into Siri and has explored the possibility of running a large language model on the iPhone.
Of course, in the Chinese market, Apple has had to seek local partners due to self-evident data and regulatory issues.
From Apple’s point of view, if there is a local demand for partners in China, it should indeed be Baidu at the first time.
The reason is simple, Baidu and Apple have a localized partnership of more than a decade, and the two sides have reached a cooperation as early as 2012, based on which iPhone and iPad users will be able to use the Baidu search engine – not only that, but by 2015, Baidu will replace Bing as Siri’s default search engine in China.
Such a deep foundation of cooperation is the core support for Apple to choose to cooperate with Baidu in AI at the beginning.
Of course, from the perspective of AI capabilities, Baidu’s performance in large language models will indeed be in the limelight throughout 2023, and among the large models released in China at that time, Baidu Wenxin Yiyan 4.0 is quite the leader of domestic large models – based on this consideration, it is indeed reasonable for Apple to choose to contact Baidu first.
So in late March 2024, the US media “Wall Street Journal” was the first to break the news that Apple was looking for a local generative AI provider in China, and Apple discussed the use of Baidu’s artificial intelligence technology in Chinese devices, and Baidu may provide AI capabilities for devices such as Apple’s iPhone 16 this year.
Affected by this news, Baidu’s stock price rose sharply.
But a few days later, people close to Apple denied the news, saying that the two sides had not reached any form of cooperation – Baidu’s stock price fell again.
Obviously, although the news of the cooperation between Baidu and Apple seemed confusing at that time, Apple, as one of the world’s most well-known consumer electronic device companies, has indeed attracted much attention for its cooperation related to AI landing, and it does represent the outside world’s expectations for the commercialization of AI to a certain extent.
Especially in the Chinese market.
Baidu is followed by Alibaba
In June 2024, Apple announced Apple Intelligence at WWDC and announced a partnership with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into its system ecosystem – however, Apple has not made any statement on how to implement AI in the Chinese market.
In fact, Apple’s cooperation with Baidu has been underway.
But the problem is that Baidu’s cooperation with Apple has not been very smooth, but has encountered some obstacles.
For example, according to The Information in December 2024, citing two people familiar with the matter, Baidu and Apple engineers have been debugging Baidu’s large models to better serve users, but the problem is that these models do not understand user instructions well and give accurate responses to common scenarios.
In fact, according to people familiar with the matter, because Apple’s requirements for user experience are too strict, it is difficult for Baidu to cope with it in the process of cooperation, and the polishing of some product details is always prone to repeatedness.
In addition to technical issues, the collaboration between Baidu and Apple has also encountered obstacles in terms of data privacy – for example, Baidu wants to retain the data of iPhone users who perform AI searches, but this is obviously unacceptable to Apple.
It is worth emphasizing that while continuing to explore cooperation with Baidu, Apple has also adopted a strategy of long betting.
The reason is that in Apple’s past supply chain strategy, the use of multiple suppliers has always been a key way for Apple to ensure supply chain stability and control costs as a strong party. Therefore, in terms of AI strategy, it is understandable that Apple adopts a long bet.
In fact, regarding Apple’s AI strategy, Tim Cook also specifically talked about it in public:
From a capital expenditure perspective, we’ve always been very cautious, cautious about spending, and we’re going to continue to leverage a hybrid model, which I think will continue to work.
Therefore, while cooperating with Baidu and encountering obstacles, Apple has also made potential contacts with a number of large model players in the Chinese market and discussed the possibility of cooperation. These players include Alibaba, Tencent, Byte, and even some small large model startups, such as Zhipu and DeepSeek.
Among them, according to Caijing, in November 2024, Apple and Tencent discussed the possibility of cooperation, but there was no actual progress; A month later, Apple approached Tencent again and expressed its intention to formally cooperate – but in the end, the two sides did not reach a cooperation.
It is understood that the reason why Tencent failed to reach cooperation with Apple is that in addition to the technical dimension, there is also a major dimension of impact – interests. After all, Apple has previously pressured Tencent to take measures to prevent mini program operators from directing users to external payment systems to circumvent the 30% Apple tax.
Regarding the potential cooperative relationship between ByteDance and Apple, Byte’s attitude is actually more conservative, and behind this is also related to the international situation faced by ByteDance.
Of course, Apple has also approached DeepSeek, but DeepSeek does not have experience serving large enterprises like Apple, and the two sides lack the basis for cooperation.
In this regard, an analyst told us that to some extent, when Apple seeks AI partners in the Chinese market, in addition to the technical capabilities themselves, the considerations are also from external factors, international formats and complex considerations between the interests of both parties – and even technical capabilities are a relatively secondary factor.
So, why did Apple choose Alibaba again?
According to multiple media reports, Alibaba, as an e-commerce giant, has a large amount of personal data of Chinese consumers, covering multi-dimensional information such as users’ shopping preferences, payment habits, and consumption behavior – these data are crucial for AI to understand the needs and behavior patterns of Chinese users, and are conducive to Apple to better provide users with more personalized and accurate services.
At the same time, large companies like Alibaba invest more in data security, which is also what Apple cares about more.
But in fact, a more upfront factor may be that there is almost no conflict of interest in cooperation between the two sides, and the potential geopolitical risk is the lowest.
The difficulty of landing lies in supervision
On February 13, 2025, at the World Governments Summit 2025 conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Alibaba Chairman Tsai Chongxin responded for the first time to rumors of a collaboration between the company and Apple. He said:
Apple needs a localized partner in China to serve their phones. Apple has always been very picky and they have spoken to several companies in China. Ultimately, they chose to do business with us. Ali is very lucky to be able to work with Apple.
In response to Cai Chongxin’s response, the capital market responded enthusiastically, and Alibaba’s stock price rose in response.
However, after Cai Chongxin’s response, it was reported that Apple still continues to cooperate with Baidu to develop artificial intelligence functions for Chinese iPhone users – that is, Apple has chosen Alibaba and Baidu to cooperate with AI in the Chinese market.
In fact, as WWDC 2025 gets closer, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who has been following Apple for a long time, also confirmed more information about Apple’s AI landing.
For example, in terms of specific cooperation mechanisms, Baidu’s Wenxin Yiyan large model will serve as the core cloud intelligence engine of the national version of Apple AI, providing Siri dialogue, image generation and other functions, including providing characters similar to ChatGPT; Alibaba, on the other hand, is responsible for providing an analysis and review mechanism for Apple’s AI models on iOS and macOS devices to conduct local compliance audits of AI-generated content.
In early May, Mark Gurman announced again that Apple plans to launch Apple Intelligence for the Chinese market in iOS 18.6, which will be released later this month.
In any case, Apple’s AI landing plan in the Chinese market, especially related partners, has basically settled and is just waiting for further official releases.
Of course, Apple’s Apple Intelligence for the Chinese market will still need to face local regulatory approval before it finally goes to consumers – there is no doubt that with the help of local partners such as Baidu and Alibaba, such approvals will become more agreeable, and Apple AI will be closer and closer to ordinary iPhone and Mac users in the Chinese market.
This is also partly conducive to saving Apple’s sluggish iPhone sales in the Chinese market.
However, there are also media reports that the cooperation between Apple and artificial intelligence companies such as Alibaba is raising concerns about the US government. For example, some U.S. officials believe that the agreement may help Chinese companies improve their artificial intelligence capabilities, expand the influence of Chinese “chatbots”, and deepen Apple’s control over data sharing and other aspects under Chinese law.
This also adds a touch of uncertainty to the implementation of Apple’s artificial intelligence in the Chinese market.
Fortunately, some American media are very sober about this. For example, Bloomberg quoted some market observers as saying that for Apple, if the cooperation is postponed or canceled, Apple may suffer even more. According to Vey-Sern Ling, managing director of United Private Bank, “Apple will eventually need an AI partner in China, otherwise its phones will lose competitiveness.”
In fact, the most sober and anxious about bringing AI capabilities to the Chinese market as scheduled is Apple CEO Tim Cook. When asked by Chinese media on October 13, 2024, “When will Apple Intelligence enter China”, he made it clear:
We are working hard to move forward, and there is a very specific regulatory process behind this, and we need to go through this process and hope to bring it to Chinese consumers as soon as possible.
Throughout Apple’s AI journey in seeking to land demand in the Chinese market, Apple’s steps have not gone smoothly, but have stumbled.
To some extent, this process also reflects the difficulty of AI moving towards commercialization, landing, and finally to ordinary consumers – this is a problem facing the entire industry, as strong as Apple, and has been slowed down.
There is another ultimate question about the implementation of Apple’s AI – that is: even if Apple successfully implements a wide range of AI capabilities for devices such as iPhones and Macs in the world market, including the Chinese market, will the user value it bring be as earth-shattering as the iPhone back then?
At present, this is still a big question mark waiting for Apple and its partners, including OpenAI, Alibaba, Baidu, etc., to crack together.
