TMTPOST -- Alibaba Group Chairman Joseph Chung-Hsin Tsai confirmed on Thursday his company is joining hands with Apple Inc. to offer artficial intelligence (AI) features on iPhone in China.

Credit：Alibaba Cloud

Apple will Alibaba’s AI technology to power iPhones in China, Tsai spoke during a panel at the World Governments Summit in Dubai. “Apple has been very selective, and talked to a number of companies in China. And in the end, they choose to do business with us. They want to use our AI to power their phones,” Tsai said.

Apple, as an example of edge computing, needs to have some small, intelligent AI in their phones through partnership with other companies, while in China, it has to find local partners to develop AI partly due to regulatory issues, Tsai explained.

Tsai’s remark confirmed a report about Apple’s working with Alibaba on AI features.

Apple recently started working with Alibaba to offer AI features on its devices such as the iPhone in China, the Information reported cited on Tuesday, citing people with knowledge of the matter. The report suggested the partnership made significant progress as two companies have submitted the AI features they co-developed for regulatory approval.

Apple last year chose Baidu to be the primary partner for rollout of AI features in China but Baidu’s AI models failed to meet Apple standards, so the iPhone maker began to weigh other optional Chinese models developed by Tencent, ByteDance, Alibaba and DeepSeek, according to the report. It said Apple didn’t select DeepSeek model for the upstart lacked the manpower and experience to serve a large customer like Apple.

Apple was dissatisfied with different Chinese-developed AI models for their ability to understand user intentions and incorporate their real-world phone usage into the generated responses, while Alibaba, as China’s top e-commerce company with more personal data on Chinese consumers than domestic peers, created AI models that can help Apple Intelligence to deliver more customized services to users in China, per the sources.

Apple introduced Apple Intelligence at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in last June, and the AI system is now available in U.S. and six other countries for English version. Apple said last month it will release a simplified Chinese version in April. But it’s still unclear when Apple Intelligence can be available for users in China for Apple has to obtain regulatory approval for launch of the AI software.

Analysts have told CNBC that Apple’s AI rollout in China has likely stalled due to China’s stringent rules on the technology. But Tsai said Thursday that the Alibaba partnership could offer Apple a local partner to help it navigate the regulatory environment and localize its AI.

Alibaba released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 model on January 29, two days after DeepSeek’s popular chatbot service application powered by its AI models jumped to the No.1 spot in Apple App Stores globally. Alibaba’s cloud unit claimed Qwen 2.5-Max surpassed “outperforms almost across the board”, including the highly-acclaimed DeepSeek-V3 large language model (LLM), OpenAI’s flagship model GPT-4o and meta's most advanced open-source model Llama-3.1-405B.