It would be the first model of its own that Beijing has cleared a foreign company to run in China.

Apple has built a large language model aimed specifically at users in China, co-created with Alibaba Group and trained with the Chinese company's help, three people with knowledge of the situation told Reuters. They were not identified because the details are confidential and have not been made public.

The American models Apple pairs with its own technology elsewhere — OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude among them — cannot be used in China, so generative AI on the iPhones and other hardware it sells there has been set to run on models supplied by the Chinese firms it partners with. That leaves the way AI behaves on Apple's devices in other companies' hands in the toughest market it faces outside its home country, where local rivals including Huawei moved faster on AI-equipped phones and have eaten into its position.

Should Apple proceed, it would become the first company from outside China to win Beijing's permission to run an AI model of its own in the country, Reuters reported — an unusual case of American and Chinese technology businesses working together as the two governments drift further apart on trade and diplomacy over AI. It would also leave the company running the AI it puts in front of Chinese users on one track and the arrangements it relies on everywhere else on another, a split that opens a route through the regulatory barriers that have restricted entry for other American technology firms.

The rollout itself is close. China's internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration, entered Apple's generative AI service on its register last month, removing the biggest official obstacle standing between Apple Intelligence and its first appearance on iPhones in the country, and the bundle of AI features is expected to reach China in the coming months, once iOS gets an update. Registration is not unrestricted approval, though: it does not cover every Apple Intelligence feature.

That rollout is also already committed to other companies' models. The deal Apple struck earlier with regulators there calls for Qwen, Alibaba's model, to be built into the edition of Apple Intelligence that ships on supported iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro hardware sold in the country, and Reuters reported in July that Baidu's technology was also due to feature. The arrangement is still moving: a Chinese-language guide setting out how qualifying Mac owners on the mainland could link Qwen with Siri and Writing Tools went up on Apple's website earlier this month and has since been taken down, with no reason offered. Apple and Alibaba did not respond to Reuters' requests for comment.

What role the model Apple trained itself would play beside Qwen and Baidu's technology, and how the pieces fit together, is not yet known.

Cover image: “International Finance Centre Mall, Apple Store (Hong Kong)” by Mk2010, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, resized, re-encoded.