U.S.-listed shares of Chinese tech giant Alibaba climbed 4% in Wednesday premarket trading after the company confirmed that its Qwen artificial intelligence model will be built into Apple systems for users in China.
“Qwen will be integrated into Apple Intelligence experiences within iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS for users in China,” an Alibaba spokesperson told CNBC.
The move comes after the Cyberspace Administration of China placed Apple’s AI services on a list of approved providers, alongside offerings from domestic companies including Huawei.
Alibaba’s American depositary receipts were most recently trading 3.7% higher. Apple has been approached for comment.
Alibaba’s U.S.-listed shares, year to date.
The approval marks the end of a lengthy path to Beijing’s signoff for Apple’s AI service, which was first announced in 2024. Since then, the technology rivalry between the U.S. and China has sharpened as both countries push to lead in artificial intelligence.
Tensions around AI have continued to spill into corporate policy and regulation. Earlier this month, Alibaba barred employees from using Anthropic’s AI, while U.S. lawmakers have been weighing ways to limit the rising use of Chinese AI models by domestic companies. U.S. tech giant Meta has reportedly been forced to dismantle its $2 billion acquisition of Chinese company Manus after Beijing ordered the deal to be unwound.
Alibaba said the Apple-Qwen integration will let users tap the model’s features, “like text and image understanding and generation, without needing to jump between tools.”
It comes after CNBC reported that Apple is in talks with a small Silicon Valley company that says it can shrink powerful artificial intelligence models enough to run directly on an iPhone, the startup’s CEO told CNBC on Tuesday.
PrismML, a Khosla Ventures-backed spinout from the California Institute of Technology, publicly released compressed versions of Alibaba’s open-source Qwen model on Tuesday.
The company said it reduced the model from roughly 54 GB to less than 4 GB, allowing all 27 billion of its parameters to run on an iPhone 15 or newer.
